Conference Opening Talk on Behalf of ISIAQ

The outgoing ISIAQ president, Dr. Ying Xu, will welcome everyone attending the conference, introduce ISIAQ and the Indoor Air conference, and declare the official opening of the conference. Following her introduction, the academy awards will be given out.

Impacting Tomorrow’s Indoor Environments Today: Equitable Approaches to Future-Proofing Healthy IAQ in Community Buildings

Community buildings, including schools, have been a center of focus for many of the indoor air quality challenges posed by public health events like disease outbreaks and severe wildfire smoke. Examples from IAQ programs at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) underscore the importance of productive government-academic-community partnerships, advancing health equity, and strategically leveraging prior IAQ initiatives to ensure sustainable programming and equitable access to healthy air in our communities. These programs have focused on understanding and improving IAQ in schools, community spaces, and workplaces across Colorado, and emphasizing access to healthy indoor air for those most impacted. In 2023, Colorado schools received more than 45,000 free HEPA portable air cleaners and installed 2,400 IAQ monitors as a mitigation measure to reduce infectious aerosols and indoor air pollutants. CDPHE’s IAQ/Ventilation Assessment Program collected critical building and IAQ data across the state to provide actionable guidance for healthy indoor workplace environments. Finally, a three-year initiative aims to increase wildfire smoke preparedness in community buildings and schools through education and training with community partners. By emphasizing the importance of partnerships, strategic planning, and health equity, this talk provides insights on successful initiatives and addresses some challenges faced by IAQ programs as we navigate this conversation on sustaining the indoor air revolution.

From Energy to Equity: Resident-centric retrofits for social housing

Housing around the world will need to be retrofit to achieve our decarbonization goals. Social (or public) housing is a particularly critical sector given that it often serves priority populations who have limited choice in how they are housed. At the same time, social housing in many jurisdictions suffers disproportionately from poor performance that impacts the resident experience including IAQ, thermal comfort and control issues, often due to underinvestment at the time of construction and through the building service life. Further, these performance issues will be exacerbated as our changing climate brings more extreme weather events, including heat waves and wildfires. This talk will explore some of the present and future pressures facing social housing and how we can use retrofit investments to go beyond decarbonization to improve equitable access to safe and healthy housing. Using examples from post-occupancy evaluations, we’ll examine challenges with some current energy retrofit practices and then find inspiration in projects that take a resident-centric approach by considering resilience to future extreme events and resident wellbeing, including health and comfort.

Introducing Indoor Environments – the new ISIAQ-owned journal

ISIAQ launched the first society-owned journal with Elsevier – Indoor Environments in early 2024. This followed the unfortunate transfer of our early journal Indoor Air to Hindawi by Wiley in June 2022. I wrote then “this is not farewell, but a new beginning.” Indoor environments will continue to be a community-based, international, and multi-disciplinary journal and be dedicated to indoor environment sciences, with a broader scope, e.g. climate, sustainability, environmental impacts, and heat-resilient indoor environment. Being a new journal, Indoor Environments will be open to suggested new scope from the community – just write to the editors. I hope to share the passion, vision, and plan of the editorial board for the new journal and hear suggestions from the community.

Indoor Environmental Exposures in NYC and Disparities in Neighborhood Asthma Prevalence

Within New York City, the prevalence of asthma and rates of hospitalizations for asthma vary dramatically among neighborhoods leading to great difference in asthma risk among children living just city blocks apart. Multiple indoor environmental exposures are thought to drive these differences, including those with sources from cockroaches and mice, fungi, combustion byproducts, pesticides and other manmade chemicals. Using NYC as a framework, the relevance of these exposures to the development of asthma and allergy and the exacerbation of asthma symptoms will be discussed. The possibility for individual, building level and city-wide interventions will also be examined.

Moving Heat Disparities Indoors

Last year was the hottest on record on the planet, and with our changing climate, the public health threats of extreme heat continue to grow. Although cities across the world have invested in mitigating ambient heat disparities via urban cooling solutions, limited attention has been paid to indoor heat. In parallel, inequities in heat related morbidity and mortality are being driven by disparities in social, environmental, and building factors. In this talk Dr. Fabian will share lessons from a long-term project to build resilience to extreme heat in environmental justice neighborhoods. She will discuss how tools from the indoor air science community can be leveraged to inform city and community decisions, the value of transdisciplinary collaborations, and current opportunities to reduce indoor heat exposure disparities through climate adaptation and building decarbonization initiatives.

People, Science and Policy: Strategies from Lead Poisoning Prevention to Inform the Indoor Air Revolution

In the 1970s there were hundreds of US childhood lead fatalities from lead paint annually. A reactive medical approach emerged between 1970-1990 that treated children, but only after their blood lead levels had already risen and the damage was done. Science had largely failed to uncover exposure pathways and early remediation often did more harm than good. The housing and environmental professions were largely missing in action. But by 1992 a new enlightened law was passed due to better science, an engaged citizenry, and more involvement from building and environmental professionals. There were nine key factors: research on new measurement, risk assessment, inspection, and remediation protocols & exposure limits; turning research into practical and valid guidelines; legislation to give the guidelines the force of law; public education; strategic plans; market forces; subsidies and enforcement where the private market fails; on-going evaluation; and above all, preventing exposure instead of merely reacting. It took courageous sacrifices to make all that happen and overcome opposition. The result: blood lead levels improved by more than 93% and disparities narrowed. A global healthy housing movement emerged, with WHO releasing housing and health guidelines. This talk will outline how the lessons from lead paint can be applied to other indoor contaminants. The lead paint experience reflected an insidious policy paralysis paradox that stalks the efforts to improve indoor air quality. Some argued the problem was too big and expensive to solve, while others said it didn’t exist at all (like Covid-19, climate change and yes, other indoor air challenges). To succeed, the indoor air revolution must end this paralysis around the world. This talk discusses how that can and must happen.

Enabling Infection Resilient Environments – From Science to Policy and Practice

Over the course of the pandemic we became acutely aware of the role that the environment plays in transmission of diseases, and how our interactions in indoor spaces determine the risk of infection. At the same time, the focus on mitigations such as ventilation significantly accelerated the wider understanding of indoor air quality and health worldwide. Understanding the routes of transmission is challenging, but fluid dynamics modelling, assessment of indoor airflows, and development of technology solutions can play an important role in identifying mechanisms and determining mitigations. However, this evidence is only one part of a complex picture, and successful strategies to mitigate transmission are significantly influenced by human behavior, organizational strategy and policy choices. They also have to be considered alongside other challenges including thermal comfort, energy, security and climate mitigation and adaption. Tackling the pandemic urgently needed evidence to support national and international decisions, and the response pulled scientists worldwide into rapid research as well as supporting communication of evidence. In this talk I will give an insight into our learning around the complexities and uncertainties of disease transmission in indoor environments and how these play into implementing practical mitigations such as ventilation controls and air cleaning technologies. I will reflect on the challenges in providing balanced evidence and realistic advice to policy, practice and public and how this influences the research we do going forward.

Too Many Indoor Pollutants to Measure: Finding Exposure Surrogates Pertinent to Health Effects

Indoor chemical species are too numerous to measure all. Outdoor pollutants can enter an indoor environment. Historical and contemporary building materials can release toxic pollutants, some of which (e.g., PFAS) can accumulate indoors. The indoor environment is increasing recognized as a dynamic “reactor” in which chemical species present in the air and on surfaces can be oxidized to form secondary organic aerosols, gaseous and semi-volatile species. Numerous studies have characterized various indoor chemical mixtures and contributed to the knowledge of human exposures occurring indoors. However, few studies have directly connected specific indoor chemical exposures to health outcomes, largely due to the challenge in accurately assessing toxic components of the mixture. More efforts should be made on finding exposure surrogates most pertinent to toxic effects. One approach is to measure chemical-specific or mixture-specific exposure biomarkers with a known pathophysiologic consequence (e.g., metabolites, hemoglobin adducts, oxidation products of essential biomolecules DNA or lipids). Another approach is to use a simple proxy to capture a mixture including short-lived reaction intermediates that are hard to measure. For example, recent studies showed that indoor O3 loss (defined as outdoor ozone concentration minus indoor ozone concentration), as a surrogate of ozone reaction products, was associated with more indicators of cardiorespiratory pathophysiology than ozone exposure.

Thermal Comfort for the Next Generation

In 2013, we published a review paper titled “Progress in thermal comfort research over the last twenty years” in Indoor Air Journal. In that paper, we covered various topics such as adaptive thermal comfort, thermal comfort and air movement inside buildings, thermal acceptability under personal comfort systems, thermal comfort in non-uniform and non-steady-state environments, multi-node models of human thermal physiology and comfort, thermal comfort in alternative HVAC designs, thermal comfort in mixed-mode buildings, thermal comfort and productivity, and so on and proposed a new framework for thermal comfort research. Since then, another ten years have passed, and the broader context of climate change and resilience in the post-COVID world has become more relevant. My talk will focus especially on Personal Comfort Systems (PCS), which are related to diversity in occupants, alliesthesia, sleeping environments and digital technology.

Lessons Learned and the Future of Indoor Air Science

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged a relatively unprepared humankind, caused immense morbidity and mortality, psychological impairments, damage to economies, deep political strains, public confusion and conflicts, scientific misinformation, politicalization of previously trusted authorities, and even tensions between scientific disciplines. It has also led to greater public awareness of the importance of indoor air quality, etched basic concepts of building and aerosol science into the public lexicon, and led to new standards and innovations. As a community of indoor air scientists, it is critical to reflect on what we have learned over the past four years, to celebrate our successes, and acknowledge where we could have done better and what we need to be able to do better in the future. This closing plenary presentation will focus on lessons learned over the past four years with a look toward leveraging these lessons to shape the future of indoor air science. Specific examples of major successes and lessons learned will be provided, along with recommendations for how these can positively shape our field over the next decade.

Incoming President Remarks

The incoming ISIAQ president, Dr. Kerry Kinney, will address attendees.