Thomas Hankemeier was born on 9 December 1966 in Detmold (Germany). In 1986, he obtained his ‘Abitur’ at the Gymnasium Lage. In the same year he started his Chemistry studies at the University of Bielefeld, which he continued from 1989 at the University of Ulm. In 1990 he spent three months at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg (USA) to carry out a project on LC–MS. Work for his Master’s thesis on quantification with GC–MS was conducted in the Department of Analytical and Environmental Chemistry of prof.dr. Karlheinz Ballschmiter at the University of Ulm, where he received his Master’s in Chemistry in 1992.

In 1993 he started his Ph.D. work in the Department of Analytical Chemistry at the Free University in Amsterdam under supervision of prof.dr. Udo A.Th. Brinkman. He participated in research studies on the development of an early-warning/monitoring system for the trace-level determination of organic micropollutants in surface water using a gas chromatography-based analyzer. This work was sponsored by, first, a scholarship from the State of Saxony (Germany) and, next, a Human Capital and Mobility grant from the EU.