Funds from this grant support the work of Brent Stephens at the Illinois Institute of Technology to develop and document an open network of inexpensive, standardized, and synchronized measurement devices for recording long-term indoor environmental and building operational parameters. Stephens will focus on the parameters that are most likely to influence indoor microbial communities, including environmental conditions (air temperature, relative humidity, light), characteristics of the building’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems (air flow rates, air exchange rates), human occupancy, and surface environmental conditions (surface temperature and water activity).In addition to developing and testing the sensors themselves, Stephens will make public the documentation and directions for how to build and deploy the sensors. He will also prepare several peer-reviewed publications for the microbial ecology, building science, and sensor development communities.

This grant provides two years of continued support to microbiologist Jonathan Eisen at the University of California, Davis for the continued operation and development of the Microbiology of the Built Environment network (microBE.net), a research network and associated website that aims to encourage collaboration, resource sharing, and information exchange in the growing multidisciplinary community of researchers working on understanding the built environment microbiome. Funded activities include the continued operation of the network website, the curation and creation of tools and other resources for researchers, the coordination of several meetings and workshops, and outreach to relevant stakeholders, including researchers, regulators, government funding agencies, and the public.

The grant provides two years of continued support to the University of Oregon’s Biology and the Built Environment (BioBE) Center, a pioneering research center founded with Sloan support and dedicated to developing a predictive science of the built environment microbiome through partnerships between architects and biologists. Over the next two years, the BioBE Center, led by microbiologist Jessica Green, will address two primary research questions: what dispersal vectors (e.g., ventilation and human occupancy) significantly influence the microbial profile of the built environment?  And what attributes of the built environment (e.g., building materials and interior temperature) shape microbial community composition indoors?  Research will be driven by the latest advances in microbiological instrumentation and methodology, including a climate-controlled chamber, microbiome diversity mapping, high throughput sequencing and analysis, and new visualization tools.  In addition to conducting basic research and disseminating results through peer-reviewed journals and conferences, the BioBE team will be involved in educating the next generation of built environment microbiologists, training at least one undergraduate student, three graduate students, two postdoctoral fellows, and two architectural research faculty; and developing a new undergraduate course focused on the biology of the built environment.

This grant supports the expansion of a major $9 million, multi-institutional research project funded by the National Institute of Health. The NIH study aims to determine the bacterial community composition of 340 paired house dust and infant stool samples in a case cohort epidemiological study. Sloan funds will enable the research team to expand their analysis to not just bacteria, but fungi. Led Dr. Susan Lynch of the University of California, San Francisco, the research team will perform high resolution fungal community profiling of the 340 paired samples, conduct a variety of statistical analyses to determine whether relationships exist between fungal and bacterial community composition in house dust and infant stool, and use multivariate regression analysis to relate fungal/bacterial house dust microbiome composition to measure house characteristics and allergic disease outcomes to identify key factors that influence the home and infant stool microbiome and are related to human health status.