CHronic exposure scenarios driving enviRONmental rIsks of Chemicals’ (abbrev. CHRONIC) is an Innovative Training Network (ITN) funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 956009. CHRONIC includes 15 academic institutions, research centres, government institutions, SMEs, and an NGO as consortium members from 8 European countries and Canada. In CHRONIC there are 13 PhD students and each of them is designated with an individual research project. Our PhD students, Jian Ge, is one of the PhD students in this CHRONIC project.

The general aim of CHRONIC is to understand and integrate the long-term, low-dose chronic chemical exposure and their interactions with other environmental stressors into the practice of environmental risk assessment. To meet the goals for advancing environmental risk assessment, the PhD students in the project will need to investigate the long-term environmental risks of chemical exposure including effects through ‘non-standard’ (e.g. behavioural, immunological, genotoxic) endpoints under realistic environmental conditions. The PhD students are expected to be skilled across a range of analytical, physiological, modelling and risk assessment tools to be able to detect, manage and mitigate chronic impacts in different environments to achieve greatest benefit from their safe chemical use, while limiting (and preferably eliminating) detrimental impacts that can compromise human health and environmental service.

Jian's designated project in CHRONIC is to evaluate the costs and benefits of low dose toxicant exposure in interaction with ecologically relevant environmental stress. We use Folsomia candida as our model species and investigate how they respond to low dose heavy metals in the long term under natural environmental scenarios at molecular, physiological, behavioural and populational levels.