Sloan Foundation at Healthy Buildings 2015 America

Greetings from the Healthy Buildings Conference Committee! We are excited to be hosting Healthy Buildings 2015 America in Boulder, Colorado, at the University of Colorado Boulder. Healthy Buildings is a unique forum for built environment researchers and professionals to engage with innovative projects, products, and services and to meet and collaborate with colleagues working on …

microbiology of the Built Environment network (#microBEnet) 10/14 roundup and newsletter

We publish a newsletter every month here at microBEnet.  And I thought it would be good to also publish to the blog the various summaries and roundups from the newsletter.  Past newsletters are archived here.  Here are some of the highlights from this latest newsletter. MicroBEnet Blogs A summary of the recent topics posted on microBE.net …

Report on the Animals in the Built Environment Workshop

On October 7th and 8th 2014, we held a workshop at the University of California, Davis entitled Animals in the Built Environment. The aim of this workshop was to catalyze the study of the microbiology of built environments where animals live by bringing together experts in animal health, building science and microbiology to discuss why these systems are …

Open Source Building Science Sensors

This is just a quick post to introduce some early work products resulting from a really exciting project my team has been working on: the Open Source Building Science Sensors (OSBSS) Project (funded by the Sloan Foundation). The goal of OSBSS is to to design and develop a network of inexpensive, open source devices based on …

“The Dirt on Antimicrobials”

Bill Walsh of The Healthy Building Network has posted a story on the subject,”the Dirt on Antimicrobials” that covers the health effects concerns from the chemicals themselves but does not address the currently popular subject of the health harm or benefits from the presence of and exposures to the multitude of microbes in, on, and …

Storify from Animals in the Built Environment 2014 Workshop

Last week, Holly Ganz from microBEnet organized a workshop on “Animals in the Built Environment”, focusing on the intersections between animal care, building design, and microbial ecology.  Participants included zoo staff,  shelter architects, engineers, microbial ecologists, etc.   More detailed meeting reports will follow, but as a teaser here is the Storify from the meeting:

Temporary Isolation Rooms and their Application to Hospital Surge Capacity for Infection Control

Guest Blog Post by Dr. Nick Clements, PhD Post-doctoral Researcher, University of Colorado Boulder, Miller Research Group In the event of a disaster, hospitals must have plans in place for receiving a surge of patients with a variety of possible infectious diseases or conditions. Pandemic-causing infectious diseases, such as the viruses that caused the SARS …