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While environmental engineering has historically focused on the natural environment, a growing number of researchers, including CU-Boulder’s Mark Hernandez, are beginning to look at the environment where people spend the majority of their days – the indoors.

For the fourth year in a row, Hernandez and adjunct professor Alina Handorean hosted the , which highlights Alfred P. Sloan Foundation-funded research into the way ecosystems are influenced by their occupants and design.

The conference’s 120 attendees represented 20 universities and 10 organizations, which included the FDA, NOAA, Sherwin Williams and Boeing.  Overall, the Sloan Foundation funds 117 grants to scientists, engineers and companies studying the microbiology of the built environment.   

“This conference has grown from a specialty symposium into an elite interdisciplinary event which is helping to define this emerging field on the international stage,” Hernandez said. “We have so many inquiries that we have to look for a larger venue for the future.”

Shang Liu, a postdoctoral researcher from the (CIRES), attended to present a poster on his group’s indoor air quality research, which looked at trace gases emitted from building materials. Liu said the project has helped CIRES to expand their knowledge of air chemistry.

“We’re looking at the differences between outdoor and indoor air quality, and how things are transmitted between the two,” he said, adding that the project also involved researchers from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, who brought their knowledge of how ventilation systems and helped to take measurements from diffusers.

Hernandez and his collaborators from the FDA shared their research on genes that help pertussis, or whooping cough, bacteria to survive in the air. Hernandez’s contribution to the project was managing a new bioaerosol chamber, where they could recover airborne bacteria in exactly the state they occur in indoor air. They found that that pathogenic strains of whooping cough could turn on and off two sets of special genes, depending on whether it needed to survive on a surface, host or in the air following a cough.

“We bring the biology of pertussis, and (Hernandez) brings the engineering and technical ability with aerosols,” said Tod Merkel, adding that the research could help create more targeted vaccines for whooping cough.

Merkel and Hernandez’s collaboration came about after the two met by chance at another conference and discovered that they had complementary research interests. That’s just the kind of networking that the MBE conference hopes to encourage.

“Ours is just one of many collaborations that has been born and been supported by the interdisciplinary environment forwarded by this specialty conference – like much of the work presented by our attendees, this was executed by a new team of graduate students and post-docs with very diverse backgrounds: genetics, cancer biology and civil engineering,” Hernandez said. “This broad type of collaboration is very rare in engineering. To this end, MoBE conference pays special attention to integrating and forwarding the youngest scientific talent emerging in this field.”