Highlight
IGERT Trainees Continue to Engage in Robust Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Achievement/Results
Trainees and affiliates of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program in Indoor Environmental Science and Engineering at The University of Texas (UT) work on interdisciplinary teams in all of their required courses. These collaborations have also led to trainees and affiliates engaging in independent collaborative research outside of courses. Several of many examples are described here.
At the time of this writing 10 IGERT trainees and affiliates from numerous departments and programs (Architectural Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Materials Engineering, Community and Regional Planning, Psychology) are working in three field teams and are taking measurements of carbon dioxide concentrations indoors and outdoors at various locations in and around the University of Texas campus. Nearly 20 locations include lecture rooms, elevators, buses, coffee shops, gymnasium, a campus daycare center and more. The carbon dioxide measurements are used to determine “rebreathed fraction”, i.e., the fraction of each breath inhaled in an environment that was previously exhaled by someone else in that environment. The rebreathed fraction is then used in conjunction with a published model and literature data on quanta generation rates (surrogate for infectivity of particle releases) to estimate the probability of susceptible individuals contracting influenza if they are in an environment for a certain amount of time with a person who is infected. Each interdisciplinary team will make a formal presentation of results in a forum open to the university community in early May, 2011, and will then collectively develop information sheets to inform the university community about influenza “hot spots” on campus. Trainees and affiliates will also complete an assessment of changes in ventilation systems in each environment that are needed to reduce the chance of epidemic, i.e., by reducing the infected population to less than one per environment.
IGERT trainees and affiliates from Psychology, Community and Regional Planning and several engineering disciplines have forged a common interest in how psychology and personality affects actions that influence indoor air quality. Trainee Lindsay Graham (Psychology) teamed with trainee Erin Darling (Environmental Engineering) and affiliate Meng Ke (Environmental Engineering) to study how three basic human emotions affect indoor space choices that in turn affect sources of indoor air pollution. Using an existing survey data base, they focused on emotion tendencies of individuals and how this affected their use of products that emit harmful pollutants into indoor air. Their work will be presented at a large international conference (Indoor Air 2011) in June, 2011. In a follow-up project, trainee Lindsay Graham (Psychology) has led a team of 4 other trainees and 5 affiliates from engineering disciplines in an extensive survey intended to explore associations between basic personality types and knowledge of indoor environmental quality or specific activities that affect indoor environmental quality, for better or worse. The students were required to go through a formal internal review board assessment for human subjects prior to starting their project (an educational experience for most students). They used a sophisticated psychological survey tool often used in psychology research to ascertain personality types and sub-types, but also amended the survey with a series of approximately 30 questions related to knowledge of indoor environmental quality or activities that they engage in that affects (positively or negatively) indoor environmental quality. A large number of survey responses are now being studied by the student teams with the intent of exploring associations between personality types and indoor environmental quality knowledge and actions. The participating trainees and affiliates intend on submitting a paper on results to a technical journal.
IGERT trainee Sara Hammerschmidt (Community and Regional Planning) teamed with IGERT affiliate Adam Keeling (Architectural Engineering) to complete a comprehensive evaluation of house plants as air purifiers. They reviewed existing literature, extracted experimental data, and converted the data to a common metric, clean air delivery rate (CADR), needed for comparison with conventional air purifiers. It was determined that, depending on plant species and specific pollutants (mostly formaldehyde and a range of volatile organic compounds), CADR for house plants are 100 to 10,000 times lower than engineered portable air purifiers. In other words, a house would have to contain 100 to 10,000 house plants to achieve the effectiveness of simple and commercially available air purifiers. In most cases, less than 100 house plants would cause no measurable indoor air quality benefit to homes. These findings are novel and significant given public interest in this subject. Importantly, Hammerschmidt and Keeling have continued to work on this project well after its origin in an IGERT course and hope to submit a journal manuscript on their findings.
Address Goals
The interdisciplinary research activities described here often involve discovery based on previously unreported research findings. Several of these interdisciplinary projects have been presented, or will soon be presented, at national and international conferences, are evolving into thesis or dissertation research, and/or will be submitted for publication in peer-reviewed journals. However, since each IGERT student has an opportunity to work on an approximate 6 to 8 interdisciplinary teams in their IGERT courses, there is also a substantial learning experience associated with both the obstacles and benefits of successful interdisciplinary collaboration. For some of these interdisciplinary projects the learning benefit extends to a greater community. This is obvious in terms of the professional community that hears of the research and conferences or reads related papers in journals. However, in the case of the influenza hot spots study the results will be used to inform the greater university community as well.
