Dimosthenis A. Sarigiannis
Welcome to EnvE-Lab
The Environmental Engineering Laboratory (ENVE Lab) was established at the Chemical Engineering department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) in the second half of 2011. Its objective is to become an international center of reference for environmental engineering addressing the interactions between environment and human health and exploiting this knowledge to the design of novel chemical processes and products servicing the sustainability objectives.
Thus, the main thematic areas of ENVE Lab are:
- Environment and health – development of integrated methodologies to assess the impact environmental pollution may have on human health
- Advanced technologies for monitoring environmental pollution and waste management
- Industrial ecology approaches to the design of industrial systems with reduced ecological footprint
Our work paradigm is based on extensive collaboration with international scientific networks including universities, research centers, regulatory authorities and industry from all over the world.
The main source of funding for ENVE Lab is the European Commission’s Research and Innovation framework programs and the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic) through its Long-Range Research Initiative (Cefic-LRI).
I hope you will enjoy visiting EnvE Lab web site and that reading it will open up new, interesting scientific questions. We shall be happy to work with you to answer these and roll further back the boundaries of error in our understanding of the world. As Berthold Brecht put it in the Life of Galileo “the main objective of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom but to roll back the boundaries of infinite error”.
Within AUTH, ENVE Lab collaborates with the Analytical Chemistry Laboratory of the Chemical Engineering department and the Environment Laboratory of the Chemistry department, the Laboratory of Applied Thermodynamics and the Laboratory of Heat Transfer and Environmental Engineering of the Mechanical Engineering department, as well as with the Biochemistry laboratory of the Medicine School.
Particularly close collaboration has been established with the Natural Resources and Renewable Energy Laboratory (NRRE) of the Chemical Process and Energy Research Institute of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH). This collaboration encompasses three international projects running over the last couple of years.
In Europe, ENVE Lab collaborates with over fifty universities and research centers in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Finland, Norway, Portugal. The Lab is an active member of the Mediterranean Scientific Association for Environmental Protection (MESAEP), forging thus close links with environmental scientists from across the Mediterranean.
On a more global scale, good collaborative links have been established with the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) and the National Institutes for Environmental Health Science (NIEHS) focusing on the development of operational methodologies and novel tools towards unraveling the exposome, i.e. the totality of exposures from conception onwards, simultaneously identifying, characterizing and quantifying the exogenous and endogenous exposures and modifiable risk factors that predispose to and predict diseases throughout a person’s life span.
Finally, we collaborate with Beijing University and Nanjing University in China to assess the health effects of climate change mitigation and adaptation policies, as well as with the Beijing Academy of Sciences on exploring the link between atmospheric particulate matter and human health using satellite-derived estimates of particulate pollution.
