Joint Secondment at Environmental Institute (EI), Slovakia– Simon Schmid, Niamh O’Connor, and Susanna Mölkänen

Our secondment was arranged as a hybrid secondment to align an on-site visit between three ESRs, Simon Schmid (ESR5), Niamh O’Connor (ESR 9), and Susanna Mölkänen (ESR13), and EI’s own ESR Kelsey Ng (ESR3). We spent a week together in Slovakia learning about EI and their work as well as enjoying Slovak food and landscape.

On the first day of our secondment we visited an EI partner institution, the Water Research Institute (WRI) in Bratislava, Slovakia. Here we had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Michal Kirchner and colleagues who graciously gave us a tour of their laboratory facilities as well as an introduction to water quality monitoring in Slovakia in the context of the EU water framework Directive.

In the afternoon we travelled to Bojnice, a beautiful spa town with a castle in the mountains to be closer to the EI side in Koš. We were greeted with snowfall in the Trenčín Region.

On the second day we visited the EI offices, here, we learned about exposure data, screening of chemicals and how this data could be used in our own projects.

In the laboratory, under the guidance of Dr. Peter Oswald and Martina Oswaldova, we had an introduction to target and non-target screening of chemicals by Gas Chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry. We were then able to do an exercise in developing our own methodology for substance.

Additionally, we extracted a sample of sediment from lake victoria for non-target screening and began to develop a method for the determination of known contaminants using GC-MS.

We spent the rest of our time in Slovakia at a hotel in the mountains in Remata at their conference facilities.

There, we had workshops on the NORMAN Network given by Dr. Jaroslav Slobonik as well as a machine learning and prioritisation training given by Dr. Nikiforos Alygizakis and fellow ESR Kelsey Ng, respectively.

It was a great opportunity to hear about the work and projects that EI are currently undertaking as well as introduce the research we are doing as ESRs for PRORISK.

We spent the evenings after our workshops doing team-building activities such as pool, table tennis and bowling at Hotel Remata.

We would like to thank everyone at EI who made our visit enjoyable, with a special shout-out to Dr. Natalia Glowacka because without her hard work this secondment wouldn’t have been possible! We thank all the EI colleagues for their kind hospitality and wisdom! A special thank you to the support by the EU Commission under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action – European Training Network (Project No.: 859891).