Guru meetings

We have had now three meetings in different organisations who are dealing with nanomaterials. We have visited Syke, Tukes and Kemira. We will meet specialists in Tikkurila this Friday and on forthcoming weeks we will meet specialists working in VTT and Työterveyslaitos.

Today we had meeting with Kemira. We heard basic facts about Kemira and then we got introduced with Kemira´s  laboratories. After laboratory visit we discussed about the topic with these specialists. it was very interesting to hear specialists who are working with nanomaterials. Im looking forward to next meetings and then we will have quite wide perspective about nanomaterials.

On Monday we will meet at Ulla´s Clinic and discuss about our final presentation. We also have to do a  summary by the end of this month  for Helsingin Sanomat in order to get our results published and give information to consumers about the topic.

Guru meetings

Many things have happened since the last blog writing. Our group has concentrated now to arrange guru meetings. We have already met experts from Finnish Safety and Chemicals Agency (TUKES) and Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE). Also a meeting with Finnish Institute of Occupational Health has been settled and meetings with VTT (Technical Research Centre) and Tikkurila are still open. It is surprisingly time consuming to arrange these meetings if you don’t have a direct contact person. After many emails and calls you still might haven’t succeed at all which is frustrating. However it is nice that these organizations, institutes and companies have been interested on our projects and a part of these meetings have come true.

In TUKES a presentation about the regulatory practice of nanomaterials was given to us. Our knowledge of the work concentrating to regulating of nanomaterials in EU and in global level increased too. I think it was a really useful meeting and it somehow increased also my motivation. In SYKE they are searching impacts of nanomaterials on an aquatic environment and we discussed more technical things. We had prepared a list of questions but unfortunately they couldn’t answer all of them, because some results were unpublished and still under investigation. It is clear that experts are careful what should be said and what should not be said. There are many uncertainties related to this topic so any side for or against cannot be taken.

The final work has also got its frames. We are now planning to make an article for Helsingin Sanomat but if it doesn’t work other newspapers/magazines can be considered. This article has to be in Finnish so we need to think how the writing work can be divided. A poster is also possible and it could be a good material for the final presentation. The material collected from guru meetings are used to gather up the article and the poster. The next thing is to settle the rest of the meetings and begin the planning of the article.


-Saara