#15.2 - Cath Noakes: The Air Quality Puzzle for Pandemic Resistance and the Vision of a National Indoor Air Quality Observatory

Part - 2

Professor Catherine Noakes is a chartered mechanical engineer with a background in fluid dynamics.

She is the Pro-Dean for Research and Innovation for the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Leeds where she leads research into ventilation, indoor air quality and infection control in the built environment using experimental and modelling-based studies. 

From April 2020- 22 she participated in the UK Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), where she co-chaired the Environment and Modelling Group sub-focusing on the science underpinning environmental transmission of COVID-19. 

She has also contributed to numerous advisory and working groups including with WHO and as part of the working group for the Royal Academy of Engineering work on Infection Resilient Environments. 

In 2021, she was awarded an OBE for her contribution to the COVID-19 pandemic response, and in 2023, she was awarded the Royal Society Gabor medal for her contribution to interdisciplinary science in understanding the transmission of infection.

We discussed as you would imagine, her work over the last few years and what the built environment can take away from this global pandemic. We talked about risk, air cleaners and her experience as a domain expert suddenly thrust into the pandemic's whirlwind.

Cath Noakes - LinkedIn
Cath Noakes - University of Leeds

Christmas Lectures - Going Viral

SAGE

Transcript

Simon: 0:00

Welcome back to part two of Air Quality Matters and a conversation with Kath Noakes.

Cath: 0:22

And so, and you know, but I mean you think right back to the beginning there was loads we didn't know, we didn't know how long it survived in an environment we didn't know. You know, think back to that very first lockdown when people were terrified of even, you know, touching a gatepost outside and things in case somebody else touched that gatepost. And I'm really pleased that one of the very early pieces of evidence that came through was studies on survival in environments that basically said actually you know what, it's not going to survive very long outside and that allowed some of the outdoor stuff to be opened up much more readily. But of course we I don't think you can necessarily assume that right at the beginning. I think you until you really know because there are diseases I mean animal diseases, not so much human, but there are certainly animal pathogens which spread between farms through the wind.

Cath: 1:14

You know there are plant pathogens that spread on the wind, so potentially there are some pathogens that could in theory spread outdoors as well. Now the chances of human to human transmission happening that way is probably pretty slim. But at the beginning you know you had to go through this whole process. I guess it comes back to risk again. It's guess it comes back to what evidence do we have around around different modes of transmission and where does risk play into this?

Simon: 1:44

Yeah, you know, I remember the conversation at the time about the pros and cons of wearing masks or not, because people that were used to using masks in medical settings knew that there were very particular ways that you would apply masks, wear masks, handle masks, the spread of disease by touching the masks in your face. That you know. There was a real debate there, for it was a fairly short period of time, but the actually do. You know how difficult it is to do masks well, and could this be more of a problem than not? So you saw that one play out over the pandemic as well. You know the in the end that in broad stroke terms, it was deemed that it was less risky to wear masks than not wear them or everything taken into account.

Cath: 2:35

I think a lot of the risks associated with wearing masks were perceived, were not understood, and many of those have been shown to be really not very significant. You know the idea that your mask might be contaminated, so you might get it that way. To be honest, that's yeah. Now we know that. That's really not that. I think the other challenge with masks is that there was a very there was. It was a mixed use thing, because they're being used both as a source control and as a protection at the same time and those two things are different.

Cath: 3:12

What you need is slightly different in both of those. You know, obviously, in both cases, if you've got a well-fitted FFP3 mask, yes, that's going to give you, you know, pretty much the best. But you know there's we were talking about different reasons for masks and that all got conflated and of course, it all got conflated with behavioral aspects and politics. Right, we probably shouldn't go too deep into masks today.

Simon: 3:39

No sure it's a rabbit hole, but as the as a kind of a politics question again, without going into that in too much detail, do you think in broad terms, with all the uncertainty going into it and all of the inevitable uncertainty coming out of it? I mean I've always said through this process in a way the going into the pandemic bit was the easy bit because it was just a never decreasing amount of restrictions until you got it under control. The politics was always going to be complex coming out the other side of it because there was no way of telling what the right decision was, and because it's been such a long-running pandemic with so many cycles of in and out and changes of government and characters within government, do you think on the whole we're in a better position now to handle the next pandemic or worse, as a result of public?

Cath: 4:43

that's definitely. Yeah, I don't know. I think from a science perspective, I think we're probably better from a political perspective, I really I'm not sure. I I think this because I think there's so much narrative around trying to rewrite what happened. I really hope things like the COVID inquiry do give some very clear lessons learned and some messages in there. I worry a bit that that you know that we might delay learning things.

Cath: 5:29

While we wait for that, we use it as an excuse and we shouldn't delay learning things and we can see that we you know there are many lessons that people have just not learned and that that's yeah that's a massive challenge that's a good way I think the ventilation and air quality is one of the positives that's come out of it, but there's an awful lot of other things where the and and that that's a much bigger conversation, because it's that's around information online. It's the way. It's the way society reacts to certain things the. There's an enormous amount of challenges with that and I sadly I think we do have to be prepared because this will happen again. You know, we, if you look at it, well, we, you know this was a big one, but we dodged a couple of bullets in the 20 years before that yeah when does the next one come along?

Cath: 6:31

and it will happen again and the next one might have the same type of transmission, but it might not. You know, the last big pandemic was HIV in the 1980s and people don't tend to think of that as pandemic, but it was.

Simon: 6:49

But it obviously transmitted in a completely different way the natural propensity is for inquiries to go on for far too long and to delay and obfuscate them. But actually there's a risk inherent in that, because every year that goes by that that doesn't happen but the public rewrites what actually happened, you know, around vaccines and masks and government behavior and public liberties and all of the stuff that's contentious just gets to boil and amplify in the absence of, you know, fact and knowledge. You know it's an interesting one. I mean we'll stick with the science. I mean one of the positives for you is that you get you got to do a Christmas lecture, which for listeners outside of the UK may not know how important this is for lots of kids, but for all of us growing up in the UK Christmas lectures were amazing. Like when you got the phone call to say, kath, would you be part of a Christmas lecture? You must have had kittens, didn't you?

Cath: 7:53

I did, it was like, oh my God, I've been asked to do this. It's amazing. So, yeah, because it's the Royal Institution, it's televised on the BBC. It's part of growing up. It's like one of the things that happens. There's a series of three lectures over the Christmas period. So, yeah, I was really privileged. That was Christmas 2021,. I think, my timeline's gone a bit worse.

Cath: 8:19

Yes it was because it was Omicron. I remember Omicron being part of it all. Everything is in a pandemic timeline, you see, and I was. So the lecture series was led by Professor Sir Jonathan Van Tam, who was the deputy chief medical officer at the time, and he hosted the lecture and he had sort of guest lectures on. And the one I did there was two of us, there was myself and Professor Julia Gogh from Cambridge and we focused on transmission and I focused on the environmental bits of transmission, so the physics of it and the mitigations, and she focused more on the sort of the epidemiology modeling side of things and the R number and how it spreads in a population and stuff.

Cath: 9:09

And it was the most brilliant experience. I mean, it was completely something I'd never done before. It was a real new challenge. But it was absolutely brilliant because you're basically you create, you work with the Royal Institution and the team there to create a script about the things you're going to focus on. And that's a challenge in the first place because you think, well, how much of what I know can I pack into my one hour slot? And you can't, you have to.

Cath: 9:37

Really, actually, it's not even a one hour, it's half an hour you have to really narrow it down and then think about what things can be turned into practical demos that you can do with kids, live in front of an audience and you do it in this amazing lecture theatre in London which is like a it's a really sticky bank traditional lecture theatre and actually for ventilation that's out there, it has an amazing ventilation system. It's got a dome and this dome lifts up and they did lift it up. They don't always it's now got a mechanical system in there as well, with some displacement ventilation, but they have a. It has this dome that they can lift up and while I was down there, the guy took me up on a visit and showed it to me because, like most lecturers don't ask about the ventilation system, he was very pleased to have somebody who was interested in it yeah, the ventilation to always want to go and have a look at the HVAC stuff.

Simon: 10:30

I'll put some links in the podcast for people to the Christmas lectures because it's a. I mean, we don't. We talk about institutions a lot, but the Christmas lectures really are genuinely a. Any kid that has been to science, the Christmas lectures have always been a very big deal, especially before the times of YouTube. You know that you and I would have sat down to watch the Christmas lectures on the BBC. It was a real treat and visual and practical. That was the. That's the takeaway from it, isn't it?

Cath: 11:00

But it is, and it's a really different experience because I'd never had the experience of being in front of TV cameras before and you know, when you first rehearse it's quite nerve-wracking. You've got five cameras that are watching you continuously. By the time you actually come to do the lecture you've pretty much forgotten the cameras are there and you just get on with it. But it's a completely different environment. Very. You know, there was a few months of sort of build up, learning, working out scripts and working out with models, and then we had two really intensive days of sort of rehearsal before you went straight into it.

Cath: 11:36

And of course you demo's never all work right on the night, because that's part of the fun. So there was I had a sneeze machine which I had, a fantastic kid who came down and he broke my sneeze machine because he blew the end of it. Then there was another bit where we were trying to demonstrate the sizes of droplets and aerosols and we dropped these sort of balloons and bubbles and these massive beach balls from the balcony and they're people in the back, it's the adults in the balcony and they got it wrong when they dropped the big balls too soon. So it was really good fun.

Simon: 12:10

Yeah, well, they say they don't.

Cath: 12:12

And then the other one. It was a demo where we had to do a natural ventilation. It was a water tank demo and it's the sort of thing you've got like a one shot at, because once you release it has like hot and cold water. So once you allow that to mix, that's it, you have to turn it away and start again.

Cath: 12:30

And then the afternoon I went to do it and there's like it's still floating this thing. I know having to talk and hold it in the tank at the same time, so that was really. That was kind of a challenge, but really fantastic to do.

Simon: 12:44

And great recognition for your work as well that you put in. I mean it must have been a real recognition of the because you must have put so much time I mean, we spoke fairly regularly to be fair through the pandemic, but you are one of the hardest people in the UK to get hold of there for a while, I would say.

Cath: 13:05

Yeah, I think I probably had an out of office on my email for about 18 months which basically said I'm completely overloaded. I can't respond to all your queries. I went, if you're the press, contact these people.

Simon: 13:19

Yeah. So it's probably an unfair question to ask you, but OBE or the Christmas lecture, which one were you most proud of, do you think?

Cath: 13:31

Oh God, I mean I think they're different. They are different, To be honest. I mean, the OBE was a massive surprise. I was not expecting that in the slightest and it was fantastic to go and get it. But in a way, that Christmas lecture was such a privilege to do and there was so much fun involved in putting it together as well.

Simon: 13:51

I guess if you're a kid from science, if you're a kid that was interested in science, the Christmas lectures resonate so much. Yeah, there's something evocative about it. The OBE is a grand day out.

Cath: 14:08

Yeah, it was a nice day out. I found it quite hard getting the recognitions. It's a bit of a weird thing to happen and it's nice, but you just carry on doing stuff. I mean, the work doesn't stop, you just carry on.

Simon: 14:25

Yeah well from all of us in the community. Kath, you deserved it. There were very few people that worked as hard as you did through that period, that's for sure. One of the areas that has really caught the imagination of the scientific community, has caused challenges for people regulating and legislating in this sector, and still does to this day, is the topic of air cleaning and the valuable contribution that it has to play and had to play in the pandemic. Without question the innovation that business brings by necessity to challenges like that, but innovation in technology in general and how that sits with what we were talking about earlier of actually having to take a position on stuff.

Simon: 15:31

That air cleaning found itself in the middle of a real storm, if you like, and, for those that weren't caught up in it, one of the best descriptions I have of that was a period of time in both the UK and Ireland where we were looking and reaching for solutions in classrooms and we knew this was an area that we needed to deal with, that we had classrooms that we suspected significantly were underventilated, that providing something could benefit into those spaces had to reduce risk, and I remember conversations with people at the time that something's better than nothing that providing something into that space would reduce the risk in some way.

Simon: 16:25

And for engineers that was really uncomfortable, because we like to know where we are, what the goal is, what the gap is, how we calculate that gap, what we put in place to do it and to just chuck stuff in because it would have a benefit was a really uncomfortable position to be put in.

Simon: 16:43

So it was a really complex space and even is today.

Simon: 16:47

You know, the natural competitiveness of the air cleaning market is companies are always trying to differentiate themselves and frame what they do slightly different to somebody else, and it creates an environment where you're trying to figure out what the best solution is, because somebody says there's does something and ours does something in a slightly different way.

Simon: 17:11

You both had to answer those questions at the time in the maelstrom, but also as an academic, you were in a position to start testing and running, running studies and putting things in lab. So you're in that unique position of both having to take positions on things but also having to give advice on things, but also had the luxury of going oh OK, let's bring a load of stuff in and test it and see how it actually does. Is that a fair assessment of where you found yourself over the last couple of years in this position where you knew the benefit of these products but also had to have a not position necessarily, but a view, let's say but also wanted to be able to research and understand and find a better way of assessing it.

Cath: 18:01

Yeah, yeah, you're right, I know in some respects I think I got out the hard bit of having a view by being in a position where we were focused on the scientific evidence base. So I guess I mean I've worked on air cleaning technology perhaps air disinfection technologies for years. The very first projects I ever worked on around indoor air were on ultraviolet air disinfection for TB. That was where my career started in this space. I knew quite a bit about technologies. We, for many years at Leeds, have had a biological aerosol chamber which has enabled us to test devices, and we've tested loads of different things over the years, like UV devices, ozone ionizers, you name it. They've been in our chamber at some point and those are biological tests. So we had some insight into the performance of some of these technologies, which is very variable. We knew that already. But, yeah, so we're part of the SAGE EMG work.

Cath: 19:17

We put together a paper I think it was around November 2020, which started to look at air cleaners, because these were coming to us. Ironically, not just air cleaners. There were umpteen technologies out there, some of which were fairly straightforward, heaper-based, pure air cleaners, others which were based on UV. We had foggers. We had weird things that people walked through, all sorts of weird, wonderful technologies out there.

Cath: 19:49

So we put together a paper which looked at these and looked at where the evidence was, and there were some very clear things that you could say, one of which was yeah, all of this trying to decontaminate a person, stuff, just don't even bother trying, it's not going to work. There was somewhere we said, well, yes, you know things like spraying, you know spraying something into the air, well, it might reduce the virus in the air, but the fact that then your occupants are breathing that in continually does an unknown risk there, and that you know you're simply replacing one risk with another risk and that is, you know, unlikely to be a viable solution in the majority of settings. But then started to really pull out what was known about yeah, heaper filters, uv devices that had some credibility.

Simon: 20:44

So let's break that into two because I think it's useful, I think, to split air cleaning into two parts just for simplicity's sake, but also demonstrate some of the problems. One of them is that if we take filtration devices very common HEPA filtration, mirv 13, whatever standard of filter you want to put into a product these are boxes with fans in them and various degrees of rated filters in them, working at various different flow rates to capture stuff as it goes through a box or through a duct or a fact, whatever it is. And even so, that's one part. And then you have other products that will change air chemistry iron, ice stuff, do other things.

Simon: 21:30

But even the air cleaning thing that the challenge we found at the time was relying on standards for those types of products. We had variations of CADAR from the states, clean air delivery rates. We had HEPA standards under ISO standards. We had MIRV standards to deal with. You have the filter efficiency of how it's in a box, how much air gets around. There's loads even on something as simple as a filter. Even that was quite complex at the time, wasn't it to offer advice in the moment?

Cath: 22:06

It was, yeah, and I think even now, the standards around those. There's lots of different ways in which you can test them and demonstrate how they work and the effectiveness is a combination of the flow rate of the air that goes through it, the filter efficacy and how well that device distributes the air in the room that it's in. So you could have a device that has quite exceptional filter efficacy and a reasonable flow rate, but if it does no mixing of the air in the room, it'll you'll have a nice clean corner of your room but you won't have much else. Whereas you know, and we can see, that there are, as well as the sort of commercially available ones, there was the Corsi Rosenthal boxes, which were the homemade versions which had a you know, which had some really good flow rates and they were very simple with you know. I mean, yeah, this is a massive challenge area. There's almost no standards properly for these devices and you know, anybody can pretty much sell anything providing it's electrically safe, which is a challenge, you know, because that's about how do people select them.

Cath: 23:23

I think it comes back to something that I said earlier, that there's no one size fits all solution. So what works in one space doesn't work in another space. So you know, for example, a homemade air cleaner might be great in certain school classrooms, other school classrooms. It won't survive more than like more than half an hour before somebody just destroys it. It won't work in a hospital because you can't clean the outside of it and so it would not meet their infection control guides. It would work quite well in an office.

Cath: 23:53

So there's all sorts of places these things will and won't work. And then you know, just because you've got air cleaners in there, it will be doing something. There's always going to be some benefit from it. But whether the really tricky challenge that we don't, we find it really hard to work out is does the benefit justify the cost? Because with whatever we will in the world, these are not free. You have to. There's a capital cost, there's a maintenance cost, there's an energy cost. Those costs are relatively modest, but when you add them up across an organisation they become higher.

Simon: 24:37

When it's an individual purchase or a single purchasing choice, there's a lot more freedom to say anything's better than nothing. But when you have to justify a spend over an asset, as an asset manager say, you have to be able to quantify that decision based on your available resources and the effectiveness of the thing that you're deploying. And that's where it becomes challenging is that we have these mix of standards. None of them will really fit for purpose for a lot of the environments that they were being chosen for. So something even as benign as just removing stuff from the air and how effective it is at doing that, became quite complex in the moment, didn't it?

Cath: 25:23

Because it did, yeah, and we could see this from some of our school studies as well, in that our HEPA filters. On the whole they were beneficial, they were not too noisy, but we still had to put typically three per classroom. So that means you need more plug sockets. So you then have to do some background work to put some more plug sockets in. There's a space thing. You know, will they fit in there? Do people switch them on? There's a massive behavioural thing. You could invest in 100 air cleaners for your organisation, but if they're all tucked away in the corner and switched off, then they're useless. And then I think you know the maintenance. If you've now got to maintain and support 100 air cleaners you have, it's not that hard a task, to be honest, but you have to think about how you're going to do that. And actually you know buying 100 that are the same rather than 30 different types is going to be much more helpful when it comes to your maintenance, because then you're only buying one filter rather than lots of different types.

Simon: 26:28

And the sustainability of your supply chain. You know, I know that there's lots of products have been bought where you can't now get the sundries to maintain them and anybody that knows anything that gets sold into an environment like a school. They tend to be very specific products because they have to withstand bags and stickers and graffiti and being knocks and bangs and meet certain safety requirements that you might not have to reach elsewhere, and so it's not an easy question. In an emergency, in a pandemic, yes, anything is better than nothing, but at some point somebody's got to be able to stand over a cost somewhere, you know, and that's and we do have to yeah, we do have to know how much benefit we think they're going to provide.

Cath: 27:16

You know, because if it provides a 20% benefit, great. If it provides half a percent, is it worth it? And that might vary by different environments because it will depend on your ventilation in the first place. If you put an air cleaner that's adding, you know, the equivalent of one air change an hour to a room that's already got six or seven air changes an hour, well, frankly, it won't make much difference in you any risk. If you put that one air change an hour into a room that's only got half an air change an hour, that's a big difference. So it's all about what's important, what's relative.

Cath: 27:55

I think the other thing with air cleaners is they are a great solution where things are difficult, where it's going to take time to solve, etc. But they ultimately are a bit of a sticking plaster because they're not a long term sustainable solution. They would be better off integrating that filtration with a ventilation system, because you know your air cleaner doesn't tackle the fact your ventilation is poor, so you're still going to have high CO2 levels, you're still going to have drowsy people. You've just removed the particles, so it's tackling part of the issue, but it's not tackling the whole issue. And, of course to say, it relies on human behaviors to make them work properly, and so I think we should definitely be investing them in certain places. We should be definitely they should be part of the sort of ask and all of things that we can do, but just saying everybody should have one is too simplistic an answer.

Cath: 28:54

There's no simple answers to any of this. No, it's. Yeah, I wish there was, I wish there was just a little magic bullet that we could just like put out there and that solves everything. But it doesn't. There isn't one. And then of course, you say, did they only tackle one part of a problem? So a particle based, a filter based system will remove viruses and bacteria. It will also remove other particulars. That's a good thing so, but it won't remove nitrous oxide. So we've not got the whole solution there.

Cath: 29:31

If we put something like ultraviolet, particularly some of that far UV, in, far UV is potentially, from some of the lab studies we've done, phenomenal at reducing bioerosol load, but it doesn't do anything to any other particles of the room and potentially leads to some secondary chemistry effects. So it's all about the right environments and where you might tolerate some of those risks. You know I wouldn't personally put it into my bedroom at home. I don't think there's any need for it, I don't think it'd be a benefit, I don't think it'd be sufficiently beneficial. I would very happily put far UV into public toilets and things, because any risks around ozone etc. Frankly the exposures are so small that it's not going to be a problem. But the benefits in both surface and air sterilization might be really significant.

Simon: 30:25

Yeah, just shows how complex it is. You know, we just massively.

Simon: 30:29

We just went down a rabbit hole with just filters, Never mind talking about ionization or plasma or UVC and so on. And you know, this is the trajectory that I think the industry is now facing is the evidencing the efficacy of these technologies into different environments, in full knowledge that if we are going to take a decent approach to pandemic resilience, say, and taking a kind of an ASHRAE 241 viewpoint, that we might need to significantly increase equivalent air change rates in times of high risk or for certain sectors in non-pandemic conditions, even flu season, for example, in old people's homes or something. You know that you're taking a view that you need to significantly increase equivalent air change rates For certain air cleaners are going to be part of that picture. We can't just do that with fresh air the whole time. So it's part of our future.

Simon: 31:33

I think the interesting thing will be what does that look like? How do we go from where we are? Do you think with our current knowledge of air cleaning technologies, Is this a standard thing? Do we slowly need to introduce standards? Is there more, much more testing and field research that's required? What's your view on how that looks like, what that pathway looks like?

Cath: 31:58

Yeah. So I think I mean going back to the positives of a pandemic I mean there's not that many out there, but there's the odd one and it, you know it did catapult air cleaners into the mix and if you think about where we were discussing air cleaners before that, there was very little discussion, it was occasional things, and it has really brought that to the fore, which is great. I do think standards have a part to play in this, because I think there's something that is agreed in some way, particularly around how things are tested and the metrics that should be provided by a manufacturer. At the moment, you can go on a different, every every product's different website you'll find some of them will quote some of them will quote you SCADR. Some of them will quote you will quote you their efficacy at their turbo boost mode, but not at anything else. Some of them will quote you noise measured app device. Some of them measured device further away. There's all sorts of different ways people quote things. I think we ought to have some standards there. We ought to have some some some standards, ways of testing, but bearing in mind a little bit of flexibility with that, because if we want those tests to involve biological tests.

Cath: 33:15

There are very few organizations in the world who can do those tests and if you constrain too much how those tests are done, they won't happen at all. But I do think there is something whereby enabling people to say, yes, this product meets a particular standard. And that could be. That could be something that's set up by an industry, it could be from a standard body. There's all sorts of ways around that. But I mean, one of the challenges I know we had, and many organizations had, was people were trying to flog products left, right and centre through the pandemic and there was all sorts of stuff would land in my inbox and a lot of that was people just jumping on a bandwagon. There's all sorts of. There's some stuff that's pretty dangerous that gets sold, and actually if there was something that you could sign up to or something where testing was was reliable, that would be a starting point at least, allowing people to say, yes, I can select this product and I can see how it could be potentially useful.

Simon: 34:19

Or to create a common language to navigate assessment of technologies. That you know you're looking at one scientific report from one product and it's written completely differently to the scientific evidence of another product One. It may have a. It may have an effectiveness rating for the product, but you don't know whether that's. But it also happens to have a filter as well as its unique technology. So you don't know how much of that's the filter or whatever the thing is.

Cath: 34:52

And it's about putting that appropriate reporting of it, that transparent performance information, out there for people. I do think as well we need more real world evidence. So we need evidence around. You know the health impacts of them. Those studies are hard to do, but I do think those studies will really help make the case for the use in the right settings.

Cath: 35:24

I think we also need evidence around how these things are used in the real world, because I think we nearly all of our evidence comes from very controlled lab studies and things or small deployments over a short period of time, understanding how people use these over a longer period of time, understanding what enables them to be used effectively, what motivates people. You know people, people might buy something, use it for the first week or so, they're excited by it and then they kind of ignore it and you know, even if it's still on, it never has its filter changed or whatever. So really getting into the weeds of how these things, how people use them in reality, I think we need some of that evidence out there and we need that evidence to be carried out properly, because at the moment that evidence is largely anecdotal and I think having that collected properly would actually really help some of those conversations as well.

Simon: 36:30

Yeah, yeah, interesting. I was going to ask you like we've seen such a shift in research, inevitably out of the pandemic, over the last couple of years. How do you think that plays out over the next five years, say, do you think, do you think this is directed research in the right direction? Does it need to redirect and re consolidate a little bit? Are we getting the right talent in to do this work? I mean because you've taken on a role as is it assistant dean in leads or Pro dean in mind.

Cath: 37:13

So you're kind of.

Simon: 37:15

There's a kind of responsibility there now for coordinating a lot of that Like where does this go now? Do you think from here over the next five years, in where we pull money in for research, where that research should be directed? What's your kind of take on it?

Cath: 37:32

Yeah, there's a very big set of questions in there and I mean I've touched on some already around the fact that there's research, that's around net zero and the health side of things. I think that whole piece around health in our environments. There's a great deal of challenges and open questions in there. But thinking about how these, how what we do feeds into policy and practice, has got to be a massive part of it. I say the role I have now is it's a quite a different role, high level, sort of strategic role for my faculty. There are eight departments, eight academic schools in my faculty so I now sort of see everything from the most fundamental logic based bits of mathematics right the way through you know chemical manufacturing through you know artificial joints, through materials, for you know semiconductors, you know there's stuff in our faculty on this.

Cath: 38:43

So it's really I opener looking at all of these massive different technologies and the connectivities and the opportunities, not just around what you know my world of indoor air but across the whole of the sort of engineering and physical sciences type space and of course well beyond that into all of the other disciplines as well.

Cath: 39:06

I mean I think there's some really interesting parts that are going to play into our research as we go forward. I mean, I think AI is something that we've we've not touched on yet, but is it's. It's you know part of everything now, but there's some really interesting opportunities in there around how you can use, you know, physics inspired AI techniques to really, you know, interrogate some of the vast amounts of indoor air data. We've got to be able to model things in very different ways that we've done before. But whatever we do there, we have to keep thinking about the people. So, you know, if we go down saying monitoring, environment sensors etc. We have to really think about what does that mean for the people who use those buildings, who run those buildings, because without that we, you know, you're just in danger of being clever on your technologies.

Simon: 40:04

Yeah, and one of the things we've spoken about over the last year or so has been something like an indoor air quality observatory as well and the importance of that you know. I had a scribble down a note here. Mustn't forget about the indoor air quality observatory.

Cath: 40:18

I must forget the observatory because and that is a massive opportunity I think here because you know, what we've seen is we have so little knowledge about the indoor air.

Cath: 40:29

We came back to that.

Cath: 40:31

I said that right at the beginning we just don't know how most of our buildings are ventilated, what the air quality is like and what people are exposed to and when.

Cath: 40:39

We're gaining pockets of knowledge. But actually finding ways in which we could collect more of that data, you know, for large numbers of buildings, for large cohorts of people, could make a massive difference. So it will help us understand how those buildings perform, because we've got a gap there which is around both the environment and the health and the sustainability side of things. But also, if we can tie that type of data up with health data, you can start to answer some of these bigger long term questions about which types of environments facilitate better health, which ones lead to health consequences create, enable us to find where those associations might be and enable us to better target interventions and things. So it's something that we've been talking about for quite some time. I think there's still quite a challenge as to how we get an observatory off the ground, but I'm really quite keen to see something like that happen because it allows you know. It's that first step to say you know you can't, you can't, you can't make something better if you've not measured what it is.

Simon: 41:53

Yeah.

Cath: 41:54

And it allows us to give us that understanding of the variability in those measures. But there are a lot of questions about how you set something like that, which parameters you measure Even this stuff around ethics of it. You know, because the minute you put sensors into an environment and you live stream that data to somewhere you can see when that environment is occupied, you can make judgments about what people are doing in that space.

Simon: 42:20

Yeah.

Cath: 42:22

So it's a massive. There's a massive interesting box of stuff to look at there, I think.

Simon: 42:29

If you had the checkbook or you were writing the policy, what would that road map to an observatory look like? I mean, where would it come from? Does it come from government? Does it come from academia? Is it because, like in France, it was held within the CSTB budget, but it was an observatory in of its own right, a mechanism of policy of government, but the machinery of it was the CSTB? We don't really have an equivalent of the CSTB. I suppose we have the BRE, but it's yeah. I don't know if that's the right direct. I mean, what would you see it being in its essence?

Cath: 43:20

So I think it has to be a partnership and I think for it to be successful, it would have to have some form of public ownership or funding to support it, because if not, it becomes just another research project. So for this to become something that really is valuable, we need to be collecting data across multiple buildings for 10 years plus. We can't just doing a sort of another three year project where we measure some stuff in a building and then write it up and stop doing. It is not going to be our answer. I think perhaps one vision is something akin to the outdoor air quality measurements that we have, which are there's a whole network of outdoor air quality stations that comes under DEFRA, although I think it's contracted to I'm not exactly sure, but I think it's contracted to an organisation to basically run that on their behalf. But that provides us with national data and that's a national data set that is used by DEFRA directly to produce air quality forecasts and that information is given to people who have health issues and things. But it's there to show how we meet our regulatory requirements around air quality.

Cath: 44:53

But it's a significant national data source and it would be great to have an indoor data source. That gave you something equivalent. Obviously it would not be every building, you can't possibly have that and we have to recognise that every building is different. But if you've got enough data from enough buildings with some of the contextual information about those buildings, you can start to draw conclusions from that large data set and start to and that data potentially becomes incredibly valuable to all kinds of researchers who want to run health studies, want to run sustainability studies. It could feed into national requirements around showing the sustainability of buildings, showing our climate mitigation, et cetera. But it could also feed into showing nationally on a continuous basis and you're reporting whatever you want to say how healthy our building stock is and in different sectors, and it de-silos it. It's a big vision, yeah.

Simon: 46:07

And it de-silos a problem that is running away with itself anyway.

Simon: 46:12

I mean, I've been saying for a while now that I think the built environment largely there's not a space you're going to be occupy, you'll occupy that won't have environmental data coming out of it in some form or other. The trouble is that that's coming from the peripherals inwards, which means there's different perspectives on what the value of that data is, so it's labelled differently, the quality of the data is different, it's used for different purposes, which means it's a challenge then, academically or from a research perspective, to get the context or to use it at a bigger scale. Do you think there's some opportunity because there's also. You can point to a lot of duplication of research and treading over old ground, going on with ventilation and air quality research like any other academic endeavor that if there was an indoor air quality observatory, there's some coordination or repository element to this that can speed up that process, try and reduce the duplication of study and research and coordinate in some way and get a better outcome. There could be some role that way with the observatory potentially.

Cath: 47:32

Yeah, I agree. I think there is a lot of data that people have collected over the years which you know. It gets written up in an academic paper but the data sort of disappears and I think there is definitely an opportunity for us to use this as a mechanism to create that sort of repository as well. I think there's also a piece around equity that comes into this. So if we think about where we do have air quality data for buildings, there are two routes. There.

Cath: 48:05

There's research studies which tend to be small scale you know 100 homes here, 20 homes there, etc. Which are often biased towards certain environments. So I think there's quite a lot of data on homes. There's a bit of data on schools. There's some data on offices. There's some settings. You've never seen anything. Have you ever seen data from hotel rooms? I haven't. There's all sorts of settings we don't see data from. But then the other place where this data is, there's obviously a bunch of relatively high performing buildings where people have put in quality monitoring and that data is really valuable Great, but it is largely in the people who can as opposed to people who can't.

Cath: 48:54

So you know, we probably know more about the air quality and high performing prestigious office buildings, but we don't know very much about the air quality in your small office down the road or your little industrial units. And so I think having some form of national observatory could even some of those things out a bit. It could enable us to make sure that we collect data, and possibly even disproportionately collect slightly more data from settings where they are more disadvantaged, whether that's homes, whether it's businesses, those spaces where they've got lower technology environments, those spaces where we know they're more exposed to outdoor air pollution.

Simon: 49:42

So large checks for setting up an indoor air quality observatory should be written and sent to cath notes at Leeds University. Yeah.

Cath: 49:56

I mean, yeah, I think we being realistic, this, this would be something that's quite costly, but I don't think it's the most enormous cost compared to many things out there and I think it could have a really good return in terms of the value of the knowledge that we gain from it. And take me back to the next time we have a pandemic and policy makers say, well, what proportion of our buildings are poorly ventilated? It might give us half a chance at being able to answer that question.

Simon: 50:33

Yeah, no, I think that's you know well. I mean, we're all biased in this community, but I think that it seems like a slam dunk, the return on investment for having a centralized observatory on air quality in general. You know that can coordinate, that can, like you say, direct resources to where isn't popular at the moment or it doesn't have the money or resources. That it's, it's a much more, it's a public owned for benefit type organization will be really interesting. Kath, thanks so much for your time today. It's been absolutely brilliant having you on the podcast. I appreciate you taking time out of your day to talk to me. We'll have you on again at some point, no doubt, but until then, thanks a million.

Cath: 51:23

Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be on it. It's yeah, and I hope people enjoy hearing what we've had to say today.

Simon: 51:31

Thanks a million.