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Jim Vincent was truly a modern-day Renaissance man. An accomplished jazz and classical pianist and composer, who performed with some of Europe's top improvisers, making appearances at major jazz festivals and in BBC broadcast concerts. However, his legacy lies elsewhere. He graduated in physics at the University of Durham with first-class honours in 1962, proceeding to a PhD in 1966. After jobs in academia and industry, in 1979 he became Head of Physics at the Institute of Occupational Medicine (IOM) in Edinburgh. He took over a research team that had been working on sampling of dusts for studies of the risks of lung disease in coal miners and other workers. Jim’s team defined the sampling criteria for the aerosol that can be inhaled into the nose or mouth, in collaboration with other European scientists and, in 1986, published the description and experimental characterisation of the IOM Inhalable Dust sampler. This sampler has been recommended for measuring dust exposure in workplaces around the world. Its design, which the IOM patented, has remained essentially unchanged for almost 40 years. Jim’s academic and professional achievements spanned an enormous breadth, but his legacy is his contribution to the way we sample hazardous aerosols.

Wearing a respirator is generally the most convenient individual intervention against ambient particulate matter (PM), and therefore there has been considerable research into its effectiveness. However, the effects of respirator intervention under different PM concentration settings have been insufficiently elucidated. We conducted a randomized, blinded, crossover intervention study in four representative cities in China in which 128 healthy university students spent 2 h walking along a busy road wearing either a real or a sham respirator and then spent the next 5 h indoors away from traffic pollution. Lung function, blood pressure, and heart rate variability were continuously measured throughout the visit. Linear mixed-effect models were fitted to evaluate the protective effects of respirator intervention on the cardiopulmonary indicators. Results showed that the beneficial effects of respirator intervention were only occasionally significant at specific time points or in specific cities or in selected parameters. Overall, respirator intervention was associated with reduced SBP (6.2 vs. 11.5 mmHg compared to baseline, p