Themes

This theme will consider what we don’t know about our indoor air, with a particular focus of the constituents of fine particulate matter, including the relative importance of the biological constituents indoors. The work will include an initial data gathering pilot to trial research approaches that will inform a series of workshops to review and develop methodologies for exploring this across a range of environments including taking a personal sampling approach. An overarching consideration through all workshops will be how we link to cohort studies.  

This theme will consider the state of the art in engineering healthy environments and collate findings from the other themes to define the research needs to engineer better internal environments. We will consider both approaches to building and use and availability of data. We will run the sandpits drawing the themes together to develop novel research ideas. 

In the health theme we will explore what we know about the links between indoor air pollution and health, where are the key research gaps and how existing large cohort studies could contribute to the evidence base. We will explore how we can pilot indoor air quality sampling alongside existing longitudinal cohort studies participants’. 

The People theme will work with the public, particularly vulnerable groups to understand where they feel exposed to poor air quality that affects their symptoms and how and when they feel they could have better control over their engineered environments. This theme will support the co-design of future research proposals and solutions.