In partnership with researchers at Virginia Tech, Washington University in St. Louis, and several other universities, we are working to improve the detection and mitigation of respiratory virus transmission in indoor environments.

Funded by Flu Lab and ARPA-H, this interdisciplinary effort brings together engineers, clinicians, and scientists to examine how features of the built environment influence the transmission of respiratory pathogens. Our collective goal is to develop quantitative approaches for assessing transmission risk that can be used to evaluate and optimize mitigation strategies in real-world settings.

Our group’s role focuses on monitoring viral signals in indoor environments and understanding their mechanistic fate and persistence over time. We apply expertise in environmental sampling and virus measurement to optimize the collection, storage, and analysis of air, surface, and clinical samples. Through this work, we have advanced environmental monitoring by identifying viral and bacterial biomarkers of human respiratory emissions. These biomarkers indicate the presence of saliva and nasal mucus in air particles or on surfaces that are shed at high abundance into indoor environments. We apply these methods in longitudinal surveillance studies of daycare settings to understand how outbreaks and mitigation strategies influence respiratory infectious disease risk.