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Irish Marine Screening and Assessment of Emerging Contaminants in Coastal and Transitional Environments

© Mary Luna

Dear all,

Welcome to the first Newsletter from the I-SECURE project.

I-SECURE is a 4-year project that started on the 1st January 2021, and funded by the Marine Institute Ireland through the Marine Research Programme 2014-2020.

This project will evaluate the sources and occurrence of contaminants of emerging concern in the marine coastal and transitional waters, which will allow the development of new regulations and policies to protect the marine environment.

This Newsletter, which will be published twice a year, intends to keep you updated on the ongoing activities of the I-SECURE project. We would like to encourage your active involvement in this community and invite you to follow discussions about the project in LinkedIn and Twitter.

We held our online kick-off meeting on February 8th 2021, and later our first and second quarterly meetings on April 22nd and September 9th 2021. We presented a poster to introduce I-SECURE at Environ2021“31st Irish Environmental Researchers Colloquium” on June 16-18th 2021, and participated in the NORMAN Network Workshop on passive sampling on June 16th.

Please follow the @isecure on Twitter, LinkedIn, and keep an eye on our website for regular updates.

Wishing you all a good and well-deserved winter vacation.

The I-SECURE Team

Project Highlights

Kick-off Meeting

We had our kick-off meeting on February 8th 2021, hosted by the DCU Water Institute. This first meeting was hosted online due to the travel restrictions related to COVID-19 virus, with five institutions/partners participating: Dublin City University (DCU) and the Marine Institute in Ireland, the University of Portsmouth in United Kingdom, the Research Centre for Toxic Compounds in the Environment (RECETOX) in the Czech Republic, and Agilent Technologies, Inc., in the USA.

Project partners were given the first opportunity to meet each other, familiarizing themselves with unknown faces, and marking the beginning of four years of intensive collaboration. Working towards the first tasks and responsibilities of I-SECURE, project partners revised and shared their thoughts on the principal objectives of the project: screening for emerging substances by target and/or non-target techniques to generate new monitoring data in marine Irish waters, including coastal, transitional and deep sea waters.

The project’s 48-month long road map was detailed demonstrating the route towards successful delivery and completion in December 2024.

Social media

The project’s website was launched in June 2021, and you are welcome to visit and sign up for the newsletter. You can also follow us on Twitter at @isecure_project for updates.

The Team

Our team of experts – Prof. Fiona Regan, Dublin City University; Dr. Belinda Huerta, Dublin City University; Dr. Evin McGovern, Marine Institute Ireland; Dr. Brendan McHugh, Marine Institute Ireland; Prof Gary Fones, Portsmouth University; Assoc. Prof. Branislav Brana Masaryk University and RECETOX and Dr Tarun Anumol, Agilent.

Conferences

We presented a poster to introduce I-SECURE at Environ2021“31st Irish Environmental Researchers Colloquium” on June 16-18th 2021. We also participated in the NORMAN Network Workshop on passive sampling on June 16th.