Healthy Indoors | 21
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Some of My Favorites
• Plenary Sessions:
All the plenary speakers brought something to the conference
table that we can't stop thinking about.
Dr. Joe Allen, associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan
School of Public Health and co-author of Healthy Buildings: How
Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity, made the biggest
splash with his statement: The world is listening. Indeed,
the world is listening to IAQ researchers and professionals
after learning that COVID was airborne, and we had many tools
to fix the pandemic's problems. Allen also said the future lies in
the prescriptions we are giving to people to make their spaces
healthier and safer.
"There are too many silos," he told attendees. "If you go to
a general building conference, non-science conference, you'll
see people say, 'I'm in the green buildings space… I'm in the safe
buildings space... I'm in the smart buildings space.' I think it's all
part of the same movement. It's the healthy buildings movement
honestly because it's all related. What we're talking about here is
human health and performance. The reason why we care about
green buildings, safe buildings, and smart building is all about
human health. Both inside the four walls of the
building and beyond the four walls."
Dr. Jordan Peccia, associate professor of Environmental Engi-
neering at Yale University, reintroduced his research on integrating
engin eering and public health approaches with quantitative
molecular biology tools to study human
exposure to microbes in the built environment.
To be honest, we can't wait for this research
to become the gene-based tools that
helps professionals in the field
