Towards Safe and Sustainable by Design Advanced (Nano)Materials

From 15–20 May 2022, around 120 scientists from the European Nanosafety Cluster (NSC) represented by 15 projects met at the historic Auditorium Santa Margherita in Venice, Italy, to attend the annual Nanosafety Training School – this year, as a hybrid event and with the theme “Towards Safe and Sustainable by Design Advanced (Nano)Materials”. With around 70 participants gathering on-site (plus 49 who joined online), 22 interactive educational sessions were performed covering the broad spectrum of current nanosafety research. 

The overarching motto of the training school was “Transition from Safe-by-Design to Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design of advanced (nano)materials”, as we currently have arrived at the point were the knowledge on genuine nanomaterials that has been achieved during the past two decades within the nanosciences community is now infiltrating emerging research fields beyond (advanced materials, nanomedicine, microplastics, sustainable chemistry, etc.). In line with the above-mentioned motto, the subjects “What they (nanoparticles) are”, “Where they go” and “What they do” were investigated from different perspectives, including also the views of important stakeholders such as industry, regulators and society. These guiding questions are derived from the GRACIOUS framework for grouping of nanomaterials and include topics such as similarity assessment (grouping) and read-across approaches, but also extend to risk assessment and management as well as risk governance or FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data management and data quality assessment. The topics were presented by 50 renowned researchers from the nanosafety community of Europe and the US in an interactive manner.

The speakers and participants had the chance for lively discussions inside the beautiful and traditional Auditorium Santa Margherita of the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia. Thanks to a professional technical team, participants joining online could be integrated well in the sessions. The ones attending live in Venice additionally could enjoy plenty of networking opportunities under the Italian sun in the coffee and lunch breaks. One evening, the attendees moved away from nano topics and instead learned about the history of Venice on a guided city tour. 

Overall, the participants were very happy with the training school. Some of the highlights they mentioned in the anonymous final survey include: “Getting different perspectives on nanosafety,” “Quality and organisation,”  “The community”, “Networking” and “Meeting other young scientists”. 

This year’s main organiser was the SUNSHINE project (whose partner GreenDecision served as host), together with DIAGONAL and partners from ASINA, CHARISMA, HARMLESS, NanoInformaTIX, SABYDOMA, SAbyNA and SbD4Nano. However, the school would not have been possible without further support and contributions from CEINT, Gov4Nano, NanoCommons, NANORIGO, NanoSolveIT, RISKGONE, and the EU NanoSafety Cluster.

DIAGONAL contributes to the NanoSafety Training School

Susanne Resch (BNN), who represents WP2 and WP7 of DIAGONAL, served on the organising committee and presented in the session “Ways to promote your research” and in the final interactive workshop on Risk Governance. 

Elisa Moschini (LIST) was part of the scientific committee and helped shape the scientific programme of the whole week.

Sonia Martel Martín and Jesús Ibáñez from ICCRAM – University of Burgos spoke about Social Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Cost (LCC) analysis, and then presented a case study in which all participants worked together. 

The full programme including all details on the presenters, trainers and the content of the session is available here.

The presentation slides are linked under the titles of the full event programme here.

Once available in July, the session recordings can be found on the project pages (e.g. SUNSHINE’s e-learning page).

Find social media coverage of the event by searching for the hashtag #venicenano2022 on LinkedIn and Twitter!