17th RECETOX Summer School 2021

Welcome Word:

We are pleased to invite you to the traditional RECETOX Summer School. This year with a special focus on Social and Environmental Epidemiology, that will take place on June 21-25, 2021 online via the MS Teams platform.

The International RECETOX Summer School 2021 is organized by the RECETOX Research Infrastructure and the Stockholm Convention Regional Centre in the Czech Republic, under the R-Exposome Chair project´s auspices.

This course focuses on the research area of exposome and epidemiology, with the aim to bring high-profile speakers, develop and increase the research knowledge in the environmental and social epidemiology field among the research community, and therefore, gain a better understanding of the environment’s impact on human health.

Summer School is open to advanced master students, PhD candidates, researchers, and other professionals with background knowledge of chemistry, biology, environment, social sciences or epidemiological principles, and a keen interest in environmental health issues.

The one-week course consists of active classes and groups discussions.

The completed course provides 4 ECTS credit point.

Please fill the feedback form!

It will help us to make the Summer School as the best as it is possible. Thank you! 

Feedback form

Invited Speakers:

Sir Michael Marmot

Professor Sir Michael Marmot is Professor of Epidemiology at University College London, Director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity, and Past President of the World Medical Association. He is the author of The Health Gap: the challenge of an unequal world (Bloomsbury: 2015) and Status Syndrome: how your place on the social gradient directly affects your health (Bloomsbury: 2004).  Professor Marmot holds the Harvard Lown Professorship for 2014-2017 and is the recipient of the Prince Mahidol Award for Public Health 2015. He has been awarded honorary doctorates from 18 universities and has led research groups on health inequalities for over 40 years.

Prof. Martin Bobák

Professor Martin Bobak is Professor of Epidemiology at University College London and RECETOX, Masaryk University in Brno. His main research interests focus on social, environmental, behavioural, genetic and psychosocial determinants of chronic diseases and well-being in Central and Eastern Europe, i.e. in societies undergoing rapid social change.

Prof. Hynek Pikhart

Professor Hynek Pikhart is Professor of Epidemiology at University College London and RECETOX, Masaryk University in Brno. His current research focuses on within- and between-countries inequalities in health and determinants of health in a range of European countries,  research on the measurement of socioeconomic position across the life-course and its relation to health and developmental outcomes, investigation of the role of health behaviours in explaining social variations in health, and evaluating the role of social, behavioural and biological risk factors in Eastern vs. Western European differences in health.

Prof. Kari Hemminki

Professor Kari Hemminki is a top-class researcher in the field of cancer epidemiology and cancer genomics, he is a professor emeritus of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum – DKFZ) in Heidelberg, where he led the Division of Cancer Epidemiology from 2003 to June 2019. Now he is Chaperon ERA Chair holder at the Biomedical Center of the Faculty of Medicine in Pilsen.

Prof. Jim Dunn

Professor Jim Dunn is a Chair of the Department of Health, Aging & Society, Director of McMaster Institute for Healthier Environments and Senator Wm McMaster Chair in Urban Health Equity at McMaster University in Canada.

Department chair and urban geographer James Dunn likes to bend studies around natural experiments. He studies living communities as they undergo transformations, and explores how built environments affect the mental and physical health in neighbourhoods and communities.

Prof. Gary Miller

Professor Gary Miller is Vice Dean for Research Strategy and Innovation, Professor of Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York.

Dr. Miller is a leader in the exposome field, which strives to provide a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the non-genetic contributors to health and disease. He was the founding director of the HERCULES Exposome Research Center at Emory University, the first exposome-based research center in the U.S. He authored the first book on the topic, The Exposome: A Primer published by Elsevier. His research focuses on environmental drivers of neurodegeneration. His laboratory uses a variety of methods including transgenic mouse production, immunohistochemistry, neurotransmitter transport assays, high-resolution metabolomics, electrochemistry, and behavioral assays.

Prof. Ake Bergman

Professor Ake Bergman is Professor of Department of Environmental Science at Stockholm University.

His main area of interest is human and wildlife exposures to organic contaminants, both persistent and semi-persistent chemicals, as well as understanding chemical reactivities of compounds present in the environment.

Milagros A. Ruiz

Milagros is appointed as a research associate at the Institute of Epidemiology and Health at Faculty of Population Health Studies at the University College London. She focused on Social and Cultural Antropology during her undergraduate studies and subsequently specialized in Social and Life Course Epidemiology. During the doctoral studies she was involved in cross-cohort analyses on health inequalities in UK and relationships between education and heart diseases. Her current research interests covers cross-cultural research on life course social epidemiology and at the moment she is working within the frame of the Urban Exposome project.

Bibek Paudel

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Sean N Parker Center for Allergy & Asthma Research Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Bioengineering

He has conducted a wonderful assessment of the community health effects of wildfires in California, unfortunately, a problem every part of the world will likely soon be dealing with.

Sofie Norager

Sofie Norager is currently working as scientific officer in Environment and Health, in the Directorate General Research and Innovation (DG RTD) of the European Commission. I have been working for the European Commission since 2001 in areas such as eHealth, research coordination, ICT research strategy development and international cooperation for research. My academic degrees are a PhD in Physics with speciality in protein crystallography and NMR from the Joseph-Fourier University in Grenoble, France, a Master in crystallography and biological NMR from the same University, and a Master of Chemistry from the University of Konstanz in Germany. Before joining the European Commission, I worked as a Post-doc at the University in Copenhagen, Denmark at the Centre for Crystallographic Studies.

Irina Zastenskaya

WHO/Europe supports countries’ efforts within the frameworks of global and regional commitments to reduce and eliminate health risks from hazardous chemicals throughout the life-cycle. The Ostrava Declaration, adopted by the Sixth Ministerial Conference on Environment and Health in 2017, identified priority actions such as developing national policies and strategies, promoting exposure assessment and the use of human biomonitoring, ensuring capacities to respond to existing and new challenges, encouraging substitution of hazardous chemicals and improving information availability, and promoting research to better understand human exposure to chemicals and the associated burden of disease.

Olga Chervova

She finished her master of science degree at the Saratov State University and followed with doctoral studies at the University College London, where she successfully finished her Ph.D. in mathematics in 2012 and was awarded the UCL Postgraduate Prize in the same year. At the moment she is appointed as a research fellow at the Department of Cancer Biology of Cancer Institute of Faculty of Medical Sciences of University College London. Olga is a coauthor of about dozen research papers. Her research interests spans spectral theory and analysis and processing, analysis and interpretation of genomic data and multi-omic approaches. Today she will focus on the latter and in the talk she will speak on Use of epigenetics in the study of health and risk factors.

Martin Scheringer

Martin Scheringer is a professor of environmental chemistry at Masaryk University and works in the research program on Environmental Chemistry and Modeling at RECETOX. He holds a diploma in chemistry from the Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, and a doctoral degree and a habilitation from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland. He has worked for 25 years in the fields of environmental and human exposure assessment, environmental persistence and long-range transport of organic chemicals, and chemical risk and hazard assessment and has developed a suite of environmental fate models and human pharmacokinetic models. Since 2015, he has been an Associate Editor of the journal, Environmental Science & Technology, published by the American Chemical Society.

Brigit Staatsen

Brigit Staatsen is senior-researcher at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) in the Netherlands. Her field of interest is developing a healthy living environment. Through her work for the Dutch Health Council and RIVM, she has developer Brigit is senior researcher in environmental epidemiology at RIVM. She has an MSc in medical biology, with a major in epidemiology and toxicology. Through her work for the Dutch Health Council and at RIVM, she has developed expertise in translating knowledge to health information, tailor-made for different target groups. In addition, she has expertise in the area of Health Impact Assessment, healthy mobility, healthy environment, disease mapping, indicators, and health information systems.

Tuomo Karjalainen

He obtained in 1983 a DMD degree from the Royal Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and in 1990 a PhD degree from Indiana University, Indianapolis, USA. He worked for 10 years as an Assistant/Associate Professor at the University of Paris-Sud, Châtenay-Malabry, France, carrying out teaching in molecular biology and microbiology, directing numerous students in their thesis work, and doing research on molecular characterisation of Clostridium difficile virulence factors. He obtained "Habilitation à diriger des recherches" diploma in the same university in 2001. I have 37 scientific publications. Between 2002 and 2018 he worked as a Research Programme Officer in the European Commission's DG Research and Innovation, managing research projects and providing policy support in the area of environment and health. Since September 2013 I am in the Health Directorate of DG Research and Innovation. He was nominated a Senior Expert in Environment and Health in December 2018.

General Information:

  • Mute your mike and camera if you're not speaking.

  • The lectures will be recorded, and the records will be available on the Summer School webpage (limited access only for the registered participant)

  • The lecture will be preferably followed by the discussion (Slido Q&A). Participants can ask questions in the Slido, which is displayed on the right side of the screen.

    The lecturer will answer the questions.

  • As will be lecture indicated as an interactive lecture (e.g. coffee chat with Sofie Norager) - use the raise hand feature to indicate that you wish to speak, and the lecturer will ask you to ask questions, discuss, etc.

  • Final online test: Will be available from Friday, June 25 at 2 pm to Monday, June 28 at 2 pm.

  • Summer School Certificate of Attendance: After the end of the Summer School, everyone will receive a Certificate of Attendance electronically.

Attendance list: 

Every day of the Summer School will be created a unique attendance list which will be published always from the morning in this section. Please sign up for your participation in the attendance lists.

Archive of the Summer School Lectures:

Here you can find the records of the lectures from each day of the Summer School. 

Provided presentations by speakers:

Provided by the speakers because of direct links in the presentations.

Tuomo Karjalainen

Irina Zastenskaya

Updates in the presentation:

  • Slide 7. Link to the WHO Europe document on SDGs and hazardous chemicals (2017)

  • Slide 20. Link to mercury human biomonitoring SOPs and Survey Protocol

  • Slide 24,25, 27. Link to the documents from a package in the assessment of health risks from indoor air pollution in public settings for children

  • Slide 37. Please, read Source: Željka Babić, Poison Control Centre, Croatia
No description

You are running an old browser version. We recommend updating your browser to its latest version.

More info