Healthy Indoors Magazine - USA Edition

10 | COVER STORY— January 2018 10 | COVER STORY— January 2018 In 2007, the foundation started the MoBE program to generate new knowledge on the microbial ecolo- gy of the built environment, and advance capacity for discovery though development of new tools for data sampling collection, and analysis. The products of this program are expected to be foundational to many areas of practice. More than 120 projects have been funded through MoBE, and that research has also led to countless stories in the mainstream press on things the public can relate to, including the Flint, Michigan, lead in water contamination, microbial life on the inter- national space station, and bacteria in showerheads. The program will only be funded for another two years and no new grant applications are being accept- ed. The face of the program has become Jonathan A. Eisen, Ph.D., professor at University of California, Davis, and adjunct scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute. He runs the MoBE web- site, www.microBE.net, and Healthy Indoors recently asked him about his experiences. (See sidebar.) But let's move on to Olsiewski's relatively "new" program for indoor chemistry. In 2013, the Sloan Foun- dation began funding preliminary research in indoor chemistry. Olsiewski, a Ph.D. in chemistry and her "passion," called on researchers Paul Ziemann of the University of Colorado Boulder, Barbara Turpin of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Bill Nazaroff of University of California Berkeley, and Jonathan Abbot of University of Toronto, to study how chemistry effects people, aerosols, surfaces and air, and moisture indoors. As with the MoBE program, what makes this research different is the focus on communication and working with the public before, during and after the projects. It wasn't until 2016 though, that Olsiewski ramped up grants for the program. To date, there have been 19 grants funded for the Chemistry of Indoor Environments (IndoorChem) program. The University of Colorado Boulder was chosen to be the new hub for IndoorChem and you could say that Marina Vance, Ph.D., assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the Vance Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, is the new "Jonathan Eisen" – or the "face" for this program on social media. Check out the Twitter feed @IndoorChem. Vance told Healthy Indoors she's ecstatic to be of service to the indoor air quality community by advanc- ing the field of indoor chemistry. "I have personally received some incredibly No, this wasn't your typical research conference in- volving indoor environments. This all sounded pretty random. And, it was, until we recently interviewed Paula Olsiewski, Ph.D., program director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York. We're not sure if she'd feel comfortable being called a "mastermind," but she's definitely happy being a Cu- pid or matchmaker for the programs she's responsible for. Having an innate ability to make connections, with both people and subject matter, Olsiewski is very, very good at bringing the outside indoors. She's responsi- ble for convening famous scientists Norman Pace and J. Craig Venter, who studied outdoor environments and genomes, respectively, to kick off the MoBE pro- gram and work on indoor research projects. Dr. Paula J. Olsiewski, a program director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, spoke at last fall's Microbiology of the Built Environment Conference in Washington, D.C. She created and directs the foundation's programs in Microbiology of the Built Environment and Chemistry of Indoor Environments.

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