U.S. Army MoBE Collaboration Opportunity

  Captain William A. Pratt, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, invites interested MoBE community members to discuss collaborative opportunities for three troop construction projects to be initiated in the next 6 months: * Bunkhouse construction project: opportunities to discuss building design options, indoor microbial monitoring * Lighting project for an existing structure: UV light testing, …

Summary of Sloan symposium: healthy buildings 2015-Europe

Just a quick note that the meeting report from the Sloan-funded symposium “Microbiology of the Built Environment” held at Healthy Buildings Europe 2015 is now available in Microbiome.  Summary below: Excess or abnormal microbiological activity is both a cause and a consequence of unhealthful indoor environments. Building research, investigations, and remediation must identify compromised buildings …

A cloud of cloud things for detecting clouds

For the past couple of years, there has been a storm gathering on the horizon of indoor air quality monitoring. Nucleating around crowd-funding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these devices seem to advect along roughly similar trajectories. The teams working on these projects have created a sort of high pressure system wafting high-quality industrial …

Indoor Air 2016: Call for Abstracts (Due October 15th)

(thanks to Paula Olsiewski for the reminder, text below from ISIAQ)   INDOOR AIR 2016   July 3-8th 2016, Ghent, Belgium Important dates: abstract submission closes: October 15th 2015 submission page abstracts acceptance notification:  December 1st 2015 extended abstract / full paper submission opens: December 1st 2015 extended abstract / full paper submission closes: February …

What do moisture measurements tell us?

(Note:  This post was composed in March 2014 but somehow never got published) No environmental measurement is arguably more critical to understanding the indoor environmental factors relevant to the presence of fungi or the potential survival of infectious airborne agents than the moisture measurements. Characterization of the presence of moisture on surfaces, also known as …

Working in an Icy Fortress

New York Times and a lot of other news outlets are reporting recently on this article about gender bias in thermostat settings. The authors set out to conduct a small-scale study to find out if there’s any weight to anecdotes about women freezing in offices while men are perfectly comfortable in the same space. The …

Building science measurements in the Hospital Microbiome Project: Part 2

  Back in October 2013 I wrote a blog post here called “Building science measurements in the Hospital Microbiome Project: Part 1” where I described the types of building environmental and operational measurements we were making at the time as part of Jack Gilbert’s Sloan-funded Hospital Microbiome Project (Jeff Siegel at the University of Toronto also played a …

Review of Architectural Design Drives the Biogeography of Indoor Bacterial Communities

By Amanda Makowiecki 1st Year Mechanical Engineering PhD Student Miller Research Group, University of Colorado Boulder Researchers at the University of Oregon recently published a paper examining the connection between architectural design and microbial diversity in our buildings (Kembel et al. 2014). Although occupancy type was identified as the strongest predictor of microbial variation, several …