2018 Microbiology of the Built Environment GRC

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Americans spend more than 90% of their time in buildings, where the majority of hazardous and beneficial microbial exposures occur, and better information of how this impacts human health is needed. This proposal requests support to help defray costs of 14 junior scientists and engineers to participate in the inaugural Gordon Research Conference on the Microbiology of the Built Environment at the University of New England in Biddeford, ME. The requested funds will provide a diverse mix of research levels, expertise, and experience to achieve specific objectives to foster and grow the emerging scientific, engineering and medical community that has assembled to study microbes and human health in buildings. This proposal benefits society by facilitating communication of scientific progress towards the protection of human wellbeing. The field of building microbiology seeks to understand how building design, occupancy, and operation impact human exposure to microbes and ultimately how these microbial exposures impact wellbeing. Environmental engineers, architects, microbial ecologists, immunologists, physicians, and epidemiologists populate this emerging field. A single conference venue is needed to exchange research results, build collaborations from researchers in disparate fields, and to foster this interdisciplinary community of researchers. Towards this, the proposal has the overall objective of bringing together researchers on the frontiers of microbiology, building engineering, and health to extend, foster, and grow the emerging scientific, engineering and medical communities to study microbes and human health in buildings. The major innovation of this conference is the focus on integrating the built environment research with microbial assessment and human health. In recent years, microbial ecology, enabled by high throughput DNA sequencing has dominated much of the field. At least 50% of all invited talks will address some aspect of health in the built environment, with the remainder addressing noveltopics on ecology and building engineering.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.