Work was planned in five work packages (WPs) as elaborated below. In brief, the WPs can be categorised broadly into two components: (i) Data gathering and assembly (linkage) of health outcome with environmental exposure, and (ii) Assessment of health impacts in historical and future climate. As far as possible, the WPs were structured to enable the work to be carried out in parallel, thus enabling continuity should for example, accessing health records from new locations not previously explored in literature be delayed for any unforeseen circumstances.
The five WPs in MORDIC addressed the following key components of the project: (i) data gathering and assembly (linkage) of health data with relevant environmental exposures (WPs I, IV); (ii) examine the relationship of daily all cause or non-external cause mortality with Tair and individual HSIs using multivariate regression approaches (WP II); (iii) assessment of the derived HSI-mortality relationship; (iv) identification of geographic patterns, such as regional-scale variation in importance of humidity in health-impact assessment (WPs II-III); and (iv) assessment of heat-related mortality in a future warming climate (WP V).
With regards to research outcomes, several studies were published in high impact factor journals during the 24-month fellowship. Notably, the findings were not only highlighted by various media channels but were also cited heavily in literature, as well as presented in international scientific conferences fostering further research collaboration. Not all ROs envisaged initially at the time of proposal submission could be addressed during the fellowship. Several reasons were responsible for this minor departure. For instance, a specific research question or a dataset proposed in the original submission of MORDIC proposal was found published while the same was being investigated during the fellowship. Similarly, a RO that was conditional on an original research hypothesis, could not be pursued as the findings from preliminary analyses did not support the same. To overcome these challenges required revisiting and restructuring a few of the original (proposed) ROs, which in turn resulted in additional published studies addressing other novel research questions.
Public engagement was another important component during the fellowship period. The fellow actively engaged with several social and print media outlets to disseminate the important research findings in a lucid and interpretable manner. Similarly, as part of training and transfer-of-knowledge (TOF), the fellow attended various in-house and external training sessions enabling him to gain knowledge in cutting-edge tools and methodology in environmental epidemiology used for carrying out research in MORDIC. Likewise, the fellow’s own prior expertise in the field climatology and earth observation data, were instrumental in TOF to the host institute and the project collaborators.
Participation and presentation of project’s outcomes in international scientific conferences, including co-convening a session, was yet another important component in the TOF and communication. The fellow also earned a teaching qualification in the UK Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA).
While the underlying data sharing agreements with the local health authorities prevented the fellow from making the health data publicly available, a comprehensive set of tutorials (as replication codes and sample data including secondary data directly emanating from the scientific findings) were made available to the research community in the spirit of Open Data/Science.
