Indoor Environment
While humans average 23 hours per day indoors, most environmental research and policy have focused on natural or urban outdoor environments. The goal of Sloan’s Indoor Environment program is to grow a new field of scientific inquiry, focused on the indoor microbial environments where people live, work, and play.
Over the next five years, Sloan’s objectives are as follows:
- To push the research frontier including the development of standardized techniques and protocols, and to educate a small leadership cohort through a multidisciplinary university-based research center for microbiomes of built environments.
- To build a national, multidisciplinary community by establishing a network of scientists, engineers, and architects working on these issues.
- To convince federal funding agencies to include research on the indoor environment in their research plans by developing a compelling, widely accepted research agenda.
- To improve the cohesiveness of the community and its ability to communicate internally and externally by developing data visualization and imaging techniques and repositories.
- To demonstrate the excitement and value of the field by supporting a small number of research targets of opportunity.
Program Director:
Dr. Paula Olsiewski Bio