This talk will focus on wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) as an emergent methodology to estimate consumption or exposure to illicit and pharmaceutical drugs, as well as pesticides and other industrial chemicals in near real time. He will also speak about how new high-throughput analytical methods can enable this to be scaled up for targeted and untargeted analysis of wastewater for national scale monitoring programmes. He has been involved in the European Monitoring Centre for Drug and Drug Addiction's WBE programme since 2011 assessing drug use across the EU and his lab provided supporting data for London over that period.
Dr Leon Barron FRSC, FCSFS,FHEA is a Reader in Analytical & Environmental Sciences within the MRC Centre for Environment & Health at Imperial College London, UK. He completed a BSc (2001) and PhD (2005) in analytical chemistry at Dublin City University and now leads a research group focussing on the exposome, specifically assessing the risks of chemicals of emerging concern to humans and in the environment at scale.