Prof. Marina Vance’s Comprehensive Indoor Chemistry Study
Our very own Professor Marina E Vance is co-leading a study on the impacts daily activities have on the home environment. In this new, unique study Professor Vance and her team will analyze “how indoor chemical compounds may interact and transform throughout a normal day of activities like cooking, cleaning and even during family gatherings" and try to learn what role they may play in human health. The month-long project, called HOMEChem (House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry), will take measurements from more than 15 research groups from 13 universities, but the experiments will all take place in a one-of-a-kind UTest House facility (a premanufactured home retrofitted for experimentation) at the University of Texas. This experiment will be a first of its kind multidisciplinary field experiment and will hopefully find the answers to questions like what are the sources of chemical oxidants in the indoor environment, and how are they impacted by changes in light conditions and human activities? What are the main sources of organic compounds in the indoor environment? What are the sources of indoor reactive nitrogen species, and to what extent is their presence indoors influenced by outdoor pollution? And more.
Stay tuned for more updates and the final results.