The role of students in the BiSC project

A large number of bachelor and master students participate and collaborate in the BiSC project, where they carry out an internship for between 3 and 6 months. They join our team through internship agreements between Universities and ISGlobal, which give them the opportunity to complete their final degree or master’s thesis.
Throughout the complex functioning of BiSC, students have been and are a very important support. They have varied backgrounds: environmental sciences, medicine, pharmacy or psychology, for example. Despite this great diversity, all of them have one thing in common: the desire to learn and collaborate.
The tasks that the students carry out are mainly material preparation for the environmental campaigns, collection of biological samples, delivery and collection of NO2 tubes and contact with mothers, among others. They also carry out data management tasks such as registration of the neurodevelopment questionnaires of the 18-month visit and support with databases.
As students, we believe that BiSC gives us the opportunity to see and learn first hand how an epidemiological research project in air pollution works and to discover the effort behind it: 40 researchers, 9 working groups, 1086 volunteers, 950 babies and 154 18-months visits.