Christina Mitsakou

I am mostly interested in studying human exposure to urban air pollution, airborne particulate matter and related health effects, and aerosol dynamics, dispersion and diffusion of air pollutants.

Prior to my appointment at King's I worked in the School of Physics, University of Athens, Greece as a Research Associate (2007-2011). I gained valuable experience on atmospheric modelling by developing and implementing regional atmospheric/air quality modelling systems. I have also worked for the National Centre for Scientific Research ‘Demokritos’ in Greece (2001-2007) on simulating multiphase (aerosol) flow dynamics and convective mass transfer. My first contact with exposure to air pollution was whilst analysing population exposures data from different European cities at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) Ispra in Italy (1999-2000).

I am currently working on the NERC Traffic Pollution & Health in London project; the work focuses on the development of a hybrid exposure model for calculating personal exposure during transport within the city. In the frame of it, detailed journey information is obtained by implementing advanced GIS techniques and people exposure is estimated along their travel routes. The aim of this work is to investigate the exposure misclassification of the population by comparison with exposure estimated at their home address and aid policy development aimed at reducing human exposure to traffic-related air pollution.

My PhD thesis focused on the development of a respiratory tract dosimetric model that calculates the particle deposition along the human lung by describing the physical processes of the suspended particles and interaction mechanisms with the ambient air. The implementation of the dosimetric model has enabled the study of health impacts in terms of inhaled dose under variant exposure conditions, i.e. during walking in a polluted urban street or cooking inside a residence.