2016 is trending on social media, 10 whole years ago! It feels like a lifetime ago yet also only yesterday. For the internet, 2016 has become a talking point for nostalgia. For radiation protection professionals, it marked a pivotal shift in how our discipline is governed, applied and communicated; and for me, personally, 2016 will always be The Year of Italy.

I started 2016 with 2 months in Milan at an Italian language school, living the Italian dream, and trying to get my head around Italian grammar (with varying success… they have 21 verb tenses!).

It also taught me something more important, how to exist comfortably outside the UK framework I’d always known – which turned out to be a huge asset when it came to my later actual move outside of the UK, even if it wasn’t to Italy as planned!

I worked on various work packages at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra that year, the most beautiful site I’ve ever worked on, on the shores of Lago Maggiore just north of Milan, surrounded by beauty, mountains and nature, and by people who thought about radiation protection, risk and regulation in a distinctly European way. Conversations flowed across borders, both scientifically, culturally and linguistically, and often over an espresso or a two-hour lunch break rather than the back and forth emails I was used to.

Outside of work I travelled as much as I could around the country, taking in new towns and cities, and new flavours, tasting all the regional delicacies I could find. I spent more time in Italy that year than I did in the UK. Somewhere between train platforms, ferry crossings and long dinners that started late and ended later, I realised something: I didn’t want Italy to be just a chapter in my life, I wanted it to be the whole story.

By the end of 2016, I was certain of one thing: I wanted to live and work in Italy forever.

However, life doesn’t always work out the way you expect it to!

At the same time that I was falling in love with Italy, 2016 was creating waves in the radiation protection world, focussed primarily on the aftermath of Brexit. The Brexit referendum raised fundamental questions about regulatory responsibility and continuity if we were to “go it alone”. Euratom, safeguards and shared European frameworks which had to some extent always been taken for granted as working, suddenly became visible and the foreground of a new era of UK based governance.

Internationally, 5 years on, the conversations about Fukushima were continuing, and by 2016 the conclusions were including the human element as an essential aspect of safety (OECD, 2016) and that the most significant harms experienced by populations were not always just the radiological aspects, but included psychological and social too. Fear, disruption of everyday life, and perceived loss of agency was also important, and the radiation protection world was starting to realise that.

2016 was the year that radiation protection started moving away from being defined just by numbers, and towards being also very much defined by context, including conversations around proportionality and optimisation.

We explore some of these themes and milestones in the new carousel posted to Instagram. Go check it out and let us know what changes since 2016 have most influenced your work.

Looking back, it’s not surprising that my own professional thinking shifted while I was immersed in a European environment like the JRC. Working within such a multinational setting, with colleagues from all over the world, reinforced to me that regulation is not just technical, but also unavoidably cultural. The same scientific principles can be applied very differently depending on cultural background, history, trust in institutions, and societal values.

It taught me that how we talk about radiation matters just as much as what we say, and that people-centred communication is essential. Those ideas are now embedded in how I try to approach radiation protection: justification that genuinely weighs harm and benefit, optimisation that considers quality of life, and governance that earns public trust rather than assuming it.

Fast forward to 2026 and, dear reader, spoiler alert, I didn’t end up living in Italy forever.

Life threw me an unexpected but wonderful curveball and Spain became my new home (although I did meet my future husband at JRC-Ispra, several years later, so The Year of Italy maybe did have more influence than I give it credit for!), getting in just before the Brexit doors closed (and with slightly less verb tenses. Only 18 – still about 16 too many!). But 2016 still remains a reference point for me, both personally and professionally.

It was the year I learned that it’s possible to feel at home in uncertainty, and it’s also the year where I started to understand that borders, whether personal or regulatory, can often be more adaptable than they may first appear.