The Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences combines the disciplines of toxicology, exposure assessment and epidemiology at Utrecht University. The Division of Environmental and Occupational Health (EOH) has long-standing experience in conducting research on health effects of air pollution. The Department also has an international MSc programme in environmental and occupational health. Topics that have been addressed are the relationship between monitoring of outdoor air at central sites and personal exposure to air pollutants; use of Geographical Information Systems to model spatial variation of air pollution in addition to monitoring and various studies on health effects of short-term and long-term exposure to air pollution. An important research area in the past decade has been characterization of exposure to and health effects of traffic-related air pollution. In the last 12 years, many international studies have been carried out either as coordinator or participant. Many of these studies were funded under the EU fourth and fifth framework programmes. At present, EOH is coordinating the EU funded studies AIRNET, RUPIOH and AIRALLERG, and participates in PAMCHAR, HEPMEAP, PDCAAE, PARSIFAL, PASTURE, PATY, APMOSPHERE and the GA2LEN network of excellence.
For INTARESE the institute will make available the experience regarding assessment of (health effects) of environmental exposures. UU-IRAS will also make available data from relevant EU funded studies that have been coordinated in the past years. The main areas of expertise made available will be exposure assessment and environmental epidemiology. Since IRAS includes a Toxicology Department and research related to risk assessment methodology, this expertise will be made available as well.
Gerard Hoek is assistant professor at Utrecht University with more than 15 years experience in performing researcher in air pollution exposure assessment and epidemiology. He graduated in 1986 as an environmental hygienist, and in 1992 obtained his PhD degree in air pollution epidemiology. He has been senior scientist in several EU funded studies in the field of environmental health (PEACE, TRAPCA, AIRALLERG, AIRNET, CESAR, ULTRA1 and ULTRA2, APMOSHERE, PATY), and is the coordinator of EU funded RUPIOH study. Since 2000 he has served as senior scientist with WHO on the EU funded GENAIR study. He has advised US EPA, EU, WHO, Health Effects Institute and other national and international bodies, been a reviewer for major biomedical and epidemiological journals and co-author of over about 100 peer reviewed papers in the fields of environmental exposure assessment & epidemiology.
UU will be leading Work Package 1.3, assessment of exposure response functions. They will also have an important role in the policy WP 3.1 assessing the transport sector, particularly the assessment of health effects of various policy options related to the transport sector. They will contribute to WP 1.4 (Policy–effect) building on a recent PhD investigation into the application of DALY’s to environmental problems and the integrated development of Subproject 1. They will also contribute to WP4.1 and WP4.2, on issues of uncertainty.
