The first international conference I have attended was in Ottawa, Toronto. Thanks to the Principal’s Go Abroad Fund I had the opportunity to fly all the way from Edinburgh to Toronto. The conference was hosted at Shaw Centre shown in this photo.

The Joint Annual Meeting of the International Society of Exposure Science and the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISES-ISEE 2018) invited scientific experts and practitioners from academia, government, industry, and non-governmental organizations dedicated to the protection of health and environment. The theme of this year was “Addressing Complex Local and Global Issues in Environmental Exposure and Health.”

This theme was suitable for my research topic on estimating how NO2 concentration could affect human health in Guangzhou. I gave an presentation of my results: the number of attributable death of the 2017 was 3472 in Guangzhou which was much higher than the number of death from traffic accidents 847.

Most exciting thing for me was to meet all the top scientists in environmental epidemiology and exposure modelling. These names I came across again and again from the paper I read, such as Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, Kees de Hoogh, Bert Brunekreef, Sean Beaver, and Heather Walton.

After the meeting, I joined the group of scientists conducting research in China and we had a dinner together in a Cantones restaurant. They are from all over the world.

After the dinner, we even got the chance to watch the light show on Parliament Hill.

The conference gave me such a great opportunity to meet scientist doing similar things all over the world. This motivates me to continue my work. I have also met people running the same model, and lots of my problems were solved through discussion with them during the conference. I also feel more confident to present in international conference in the future (It was very daunting for me initially!).