The Tree of Life: Indoor Air

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Travel and meeting notes from #IndoorAir2011 in Austin Texas #microBEnet

Here are some quick notes from my trip to Austin Texas for the Indoor Air 2011 meeting.

About the meeting:
I got involved in helping organize a session at this conference as part of my microBEnet project. More on the planning and the meeting later but here are some quick notes just to get them out there. I wrote a bit about the run up to the meeting in the following posts:

The meeting.
Below are some notes about the trip with twitter posts, pictures, and a few comments. I will post later with some more "scientific lessons learned" and such. But wanted to get this out there before I forgot details.

Headed out June 6.
Was going to head out June 7 but decided to head out late on June 6 so I could get to the meeting a bit earlier. I am posting my tweets below as a guide to the trip. Tweets are highlighted in yellow.

Sacramento to Las Vegas to Austin to #IndoorAir2011#fb

Had a two plus hour layover in Las Vegas airport. What a horrible place with all the noise, the slot machines, and such. So I finally found a place that was reasonably quiet for dinner. Plus it had the hockey game on so I was happy.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Opening up one’s eyes to other fields (cross-posting from #microBEnet)

Cross-posting this: Opening up one’s eyes to other fields which I posted originally on the microBEnet blog.

I spend most of my time working on biology. I like to think I cover lots of breadth within biology and I probably do - microbes, evolution, ecology, human health, pathogens, symbioses, forensics, genomics, bioinformatics, and more. But nothing like really looking at other fields to realize how narrowly focused one is.

And that is what has happened to me since I took on the "microBEnet" project trying to foster communications and collaborations on microbiology of the built environment. I now pay much more attention to anything that might have a connection to "Building Science" in one way or another. Not only did I just go to an Indoor Air meeting, but I keep discovering more and more stuff right near home that I was not aware of before. For example - I just got sent this news link from Aaron Darling in my lab: UC Davis News & Information :: History of sciences in architecture subject of Mellon Foundation winner's study. Previously, I would definitely not have been paying much attention to architecture and history of science. But now seeing other people at UC Davis working on the Built Environment just makes me think about how I can build connections with them and talk to them about buildings (and other built environments) and possibly, one day, about the microbes that are in them.

Which brings me to another story. At the Indoor Air meeting earlier in the week in Austin, Texas, when heading to the conference center I got into a conversation with someone looking for the registration desk. After showing her where to go she asked where I was from and I said "UC Davis." And it turns out - she was too. Turns out, this was Deborah Bennett, who I had heard mentioned the evening before but had not heard the whole name. I just knew someone else at the meeting was from Davis. Deborah is at the UC Davis School of Public Health and works on some really interesting stuff. And since UC Davis is so big (some 2500 or so faculty I think) - it is not always easy or simple to find people even if you might have a connection to them.

So anyway, just a little commentary on how I find it fascinating to see for the first what was in a way right before my eyes.