I gave a talk last week for the NAS Microbiomes of the Built Environment 2017 (aka #MOBE17) meeting. I posted the slides I used to SlideShare and I am embedding them below.
I spent a bunch of time thinking about what I would say at this meeting. I did not want to talk about what we have done already in the microBEnet project. What I decided to do instead was to focus my talk was on how the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation tried to in essence jump start the field of microbiology of the built environment. And microBEnet played an important part in that. So maybe I learned a few things that might be of interest to people trying to jump start others fields. In the end I came up with some lessons learned (or at least, that I think I learned) from my work on microBEnet up to this point. These lessons are listed below
- Lesson 1: People are everything
- Lesson 2: Importance of History
- Lesson 3: Diversity Matters
- Lesson 4: Communication Matters
- Lesson 5: Identify & Fill Gaps
- Lesson 6: Education & Engagement Critical
For each of these I came up with a few categories or examples. These are summarized on the following slides.
I also identified some other lessons — I will post about them another time. I just thought I would share these slides. I think