Dr Noel Aquilina from the Department of Geosciences was invited by Professor Fai Kin Ho and Professor Steve Hung Lam Yim from the Chinese University of Hong Kong from the JC School of Public Health and Primary Care to share knowledge associated with personal exposure to pollutants between 8-15 March 2019. A presentation was given to doctoral students and post-doctoral staff on how to plan a measurement campaign and what other data is crucial to gather in order to be able to model personal exposure to pollutants in various environments or different target groups. As Dr Aquilina is becoming a leader in the field of using machine learning algorithms in personal exposure applications, great interest was shown to work jointly on datasets gathered in Hong Kong to refine predictive tools to the exposure of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and other pollutants.
In a Working Group meeting of the COST Action 13716, Indoor Air Pollution Network (INDAIRPOLLNET), held in Budapest on the 21-22 March 2019, Dr Aquilina as a management committee member, co-led the Working Group 1 that is responsible of defining the species in the field of indoor air chemistry based on existing indoor results and define where future efforts should focus.
He is also responsible of a subtask that should provide an extensive overview of indoor air chemistry models to serve as a platform for further refinements that are needed in these models. Agreement has been reached for a doctoral student from the Department of Geosciences to carry out an STSM at the Environmental Research Laboratory of the National Centre for Scientific Research-Demokritos in Athens in September 2019. Our research group will contribute to the first indoor source apportionment review paper to understand better the complex indoor composition of regulated and other emerging pollutants.
