Dr Linwei Tian is an environmental epidemiologist with a focus on air pollution and health. He has been conducting field epidemiology and laboratory work on indoor air pollution and lung cancer in Xuan Wei County, which has the highest lung cancer rates among women in China. Identifying the carcinogenic agents in coal and its emissions would affect local intervention policies and gain insights into the carcinogenesis mechanisms.

Urbanized Hong Kong provides another unique setting to study air pollution and health. Its high density of people and vehicles, high-rise buildings, a rich resource of accessible environmental measurement and healthcare data, and various air pollution control policies offers a great opportunity for valuable environmental epidemiology. Compared with static data, time series data contain far more information at our disposal for the inference of causality. Dr. Tian has been trying to examine the earlier ambiguity and enhance causal inference of the environment-health associations by contrasting the traditional time series regression models with the recent methods of causal discovery from big data.

Significance of research output under RAE2020:

1. Reported in Neurology, PM2.5 was found to increase the risk of ischemic stroke but not clearly of haemorrhagic stroke in a large prospective cohort study.
2. The impact of intraseasonal temperature variability on respiratory diseases, reported in Thorax, draws attention to the adverse effects of changing intraseasonal temperature variability introduced by climate change.
3. The age-dependent effect of ozone on asthma, reported in Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, has implications for customized strategies to manage ozone pollution in order to protect public health.
4. The reduced influenza transmissibility associated with ambient ozone, reported in European Respiratory Journal, raises attention to ozone primed immunity against influenza virus infection.