 So I'm Dr. Charles Sunday. I'm a research fellow here at the department. I work in the general theme of respiratory viruses and how children in this case respond to respiratory viruses and other exposures in early life. My work is to look at how different exposures in early life, in particular respiratory viruses and increasingly environmental exposures such as chronic smoke exposure, affect how children respond in later life to other stimuli. So for instance, previous research has shown that children who get infected with respiratory viruses such as RSV tend to have a greater risk of developing diseases such as asthma. My work is to focus on how those exposures in early life stimulate those responses that then predispose children to those infections later in life. I focus on specific viral infections. My pet virus is the respiratory syncytial virus. It's a virus that predominantly affects children in the fast year of life, causing very severe pneumonia. But I also work on other things. I'm now transitioning from looking specifically at viruses to looking at respiratory exposures more holistically. I'm particularly interested in looking at chronic exposure to indoor smoke pollution and how that predisposes children to respiratory problems later in life. Indoor smoke pollution in this case refers to exposure to biomass fuels that people in sub-Saharan Africa and other low resource settings use predominantly as fuel for cooking, for lighting and other energy uses in the household. Now, the thing about indoor smoke pollution is that it is very noxious exposure to the respiratory tract. And therefore when children are chronically exposed to this exposure, they develop a response and we postulate that this response then sets them up for an increased risk of respiratory problems in later life. This is an area of research that we are now transitioning into using the tools that we have developed for research on respiratory viruses. From my point of view, working in airway inflammation, the one thing that I've found really surprising and really alarming, at least within our part of the world in sub-Saharan Africa, is the disproportionate effect of chronic smoke exposure on health in later life. An editorial in the Lancet about three or four years ago, termed it as a silent epidemic of this chronic respiratory disease, is something that is very pervasive in our society that individuals are exposed to this noxious substances from biomass smoke, but no one has really ever looked in any great depth to see how the respiratory tract responds to this exposure. So my work in the next couple of years, contingent of course upon funding, will be how those exposures in effect remodeled the respiratory tract and in so doing how they elevate the risk of individuals then going on to develop chronic diseases such as asthma or COPD in later life. When you think about chronic respiratory diseases such as COPD in the West, COPD is a disease of old people, predominantly those who have smoked for a lifetime. In places like Africa, the incidence of COPD is in people in their 30s. It's really quite striking. It stands to reason that such an early disease burden has to be associated with a shortened life expectancy and increased mortality fairly early in life. The strange thing is nobody is looking at this. It's potentially a very serious thing that has gone under the radar, thus the editorial, the silent epidemic of COPD. So it's a really important subject in a very vulnerable population that is completely underappreciated. So in a sense what we are trying to do is invest the science that you have developed using other areas and bringing it to bear into this neglected area and understanding the biology of these exposures with the ultimate aim of developing appropriate interventions to address this problem. The way we see our research eventually transitioning into clinical translation is really by starting from the very basics, understanding the biology of these exposures, understanding how these exposures in effect affect their respiratory tract and then once you've understood that then you can start thinking about areas in which you can prevent the noxious development of those exposures. In effect looking at what drives the pathology then helps you to devise mechanisms to intervene against that pathology and that's really the way we are looking into it. Therefore the interventions that we eventually developed will be informed by understanding of the underlying biology of these exposures.