By Brent Stephens on November 6, 2013
This post was originally written for microBEnet and is copied here.
First of all, Happy Halloween everyone. I think my costume this year will be a blogger!
For those that don’t know me, I’m Brent Stephens, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL. I call my research team the Built Environment Research Group and my teaching and research interests are primarily in characterizing energy and air quality in buildings. Some people would also call me a “building scientist,” and it’s that description that brought me to microBEnet. Since Fall 2012, my team and I have been working with Jeff Siegel at the University of Toronto on Jack Gilbert’s Sloan-funded Hospital Microbiome Project. Continue Reading →
By Brent Stephens on February 15, 2013
The good news was finally announced on IIT’s website but we’ve known for a couple of months: research group member Tiffanie Ramos (MS ENVE expected Fall ’13) earned the prestigious Starr-Fieldhouse fellowship at IIT! The fellowship supports students who are working on research jointly between IIT and one of a few surrounding research institutions, including Argonne National Lab, Fermi Lab, or IIT’s private Research Institute. Tiffanie was awarded the fellowship for her proposal to support the ongoing Hospital Microbiome Project, which we are working on with PI Jack Gilbert at the University of Chicago and Argonne Lab (read more here). She will be assisting in building science measurements to support air sampling and better characterize environmental conditions, HVAC operation, and human occupancy in patient rooms of a new hospital (meanwhile, the ANL team is sampling ~13,000 surfaces over the course of a year to explore how microbial communities change over time once a new hospital is occupied). Congrats to Tiffanie!
Now if you’ll excuse us, we have to go setup equipment at the hospital!
