Interdisciplinary Symposium on Environmental Sciences -To Establish an Asian Network of Environmental Researchers- was held at Ehime University during 11-13, November 2009. In the conference, Dr. Toru Kawai exhibited a poster entitled 'Towards State-of-the-art Dynamical Modeling and Risk Assessments of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) in the Global Environment', and received a ‘Best Poster Award’ along with four other young scientists. Items under evaluation of the best poster consisted: consistency of the objectives of the study; quality of the description of the materials and methods; global comparison of the results and conclusions; scientific relevance and the presentation performance. Dr. Kawai is a postdoctoral fellow in Ehime University Global COE (G-COE) program, working at the Center for Marine Environmental Studies (CMES) from April, 2008. He is a member of the modeling group for pollutant behaviors and dynamics, in G-COE (Sub-theme2) now conducting research for making a numerical model for the dynamics of POPs.

Dr. Kawai and his supervisor, Dr. Itsuki C. Handoh, have been developing a non-steady state dynamic multi-compartment model for POPs, named FATE (Finely Advanced Transboundary Environmental) model. The FATE model reproduces POPs dynamics in/between five environmental compartments; the atmosphere, ocean, ice, soil, and vegetation, with high spatial and temporal resolutions. Thus the model allows us to quantify the details of source-receptor and sinks of POPs in the global environment. In this conference, Dr. Kawai and Dr. I.C. Handoh introduced the FATE model and assessed the centennial fate of two legacy POPs; Polychlorinated biphenyl#153 (PCB#153) and Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) using this model.

Modeling the dynamics of POPs are one of the most important research objectives of the 21st century environmental sciences, and the Ehime University G-COE program has also been developing state-of-the-art dynamical models for POPs. It is expected that the FATE model could have a contribution in such modeling studies, especially in physics, and play a key role in collaboration with many international and interdisciplinary research groups. In this context, the conference committee decided to give the best poster award to this study. This award is one of the many successful outcomes from G-COE program at Ehime University.