PREEMPT
Project on Microbes and Buildings
How do microbes interact with (and within) designed building environments? Can we predict likely locations to be able to perturb "normal" spatial patterns that lead to stable maps of microbial community throughout buildings?
How does microbial risk interact with designed building environments?
Are there patterns within building layouts that serve as bridges between different populations or risk groups, and potentially amplify the disease exposure risk, leading to outbreaks?
Are there temporal patterns in the within-building microbiomes indicative of tipping points?
How do occupancy, cleaning, and building design contribute to the dynamics of within-building microbiome, i.e. tipping points?
It is important for us to understand when the accumulation of these undesirable changes in building microbiomes amount to health risks, i.e. tipping points, which could help the development of interventions and practices to maintain healthy building microbiomes. It is expected that a multitude of health risks are associated with building microbiomes. Thus, a series of tipping points are expected. Understanding and predicting these tipping points require additional expertise in linking microbiomes to health risks and the ability to model building microbiomes as highly dynamical systems.
Can this give us insight into hospital infection risks?
As part of our work, our team has been studying microbial flow and human movement in a diverse set of built environments. Here is an example from our first paper in which we abstract a church building into a network topology for human foot traffic to determine pathogen exposure risk from connectivity patterns in the multi-layer network of humans and microbes.
Take a look at the preprint of our first paper here!
Team Members
(alphabetical)
Publications & Products
Our first preprint!