Päivi Aakko-Saksa is Principal Research Scientist at VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland with a research focus on fuels, air pollution and emissions. Päivi is also the project coordinator PAREMPI which stands for Particle emission prevention and impact: from real-world emissions of traffic to secondary PM of urban air where Magellan Circle leads communication and dissemination. We talk to Päivi about air pollution, its hazardous potential on human health and the state-of-art of research and policy activities to fight it.