Upgrading the research programmes
The most important change within the RECETOX organization is the formal establishment of the fifth research programme of Environmental Health in 2020. The other changes realized within the project are mostly in the structure of research groups and in the introduction of new positions of junior PIs, who - among others - became more visible in the RECETOX structure.
Fifth research programme
The Environmental Epidemiology research programme was formally established at the beginning of 2020 under the temporal coordination of Jana Klánová, the director of RECETOX and coordinator of the Environmental Exposure and Modelling programme from which this new RP spun off. Starting July 2020, the new research programme has been coordinated by prof. Martin Bobák. Later in 2022, the programme has been renamed for current Environmental Health.
At the same time , the new ERA Chair team in Epidemiology was established as the leading research team of this programme under the shared leadership of Martin Bobák and Hynek Pikhart. Thanks to the project, the UCL researchers are developing a crucial research capacity directly in the RECETOX Centre while in their UCL position, they are be members of the greater UCL team responsible for mentoring RECETOX junior scientists as well as managers.
New research group leaders
The current principle investigators are being complemented by new PIs, who are building their specific expertise and strengthening the research profile of RECETOX enabling to investigate the impact of the environment on human and population health. From the beginning of the TEAMING project, we have introduced eleven new research group leaders in four of our research programmes.
They specialize on the chemical pollutants and human exposure routes, cell and tissues toxicology, environmental epidemiology, bioinformatics for biomarker discovery, environmental genomics, statistical analysis of human bio monitoring data, AI in protein engineering, molecular modeling and bioinformatics, structural biology and fluorescent probes.
Junior PI positions
At the beginning of 2021, RECETOX has formally introduced the positions of junior PIs. The junior PIs are usually the junior researchers or postdocs, who are not ready to run they own research group, but who - under the guidance of senior researcher - prepare themselves for the role of research group leaders.
Two such positions have been created in the research programme of Environmental chemistry and modeling, and one in Environmental toxicology and Environmental Health.
