National Strategy for Improving Indoor Air Quality
September 8, 2022
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a meeting, “National Strategy for Improving Indoor Air Quality,” in Washington, DC, on September 8, 2022. The meeting featured a keynote speaker and four expert panels focused on the importance of indoor air quality (IAQ), challenges to providing healthy indoor air across the United States, international perspectives and strategies for healthy air improvements, and catalyzing needed science and technology innovation in the IAQ field. Dr. Ashish Jha, White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, opened the meeting by reiterating the importance of IAQ to the Biden-Harris Administration.
Agenda
| 08:30-09:00 | Continental Breakfast The Forum Foyer |
| 09:00-09:20 | Welcome and Introductory Remarks The Forum Room Dr. Gigi Kwik Gronvall, Senior Scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Dr. Ashish Jha, COVID-19 Response Coordinator, White House |
| 09:20-09:25 | Indoor Air Quality—Progress and Promise Dr. Paula Olsiewski, Contributing Scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security |
| 09:25-10:40 | Importance of Indoor Air Quality (15 minutes each, 15 minutes Q&A) Moderator: Dr. Gigi Kwik Gronvall, Senior Scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security For high standards of indoor air quality to become commonplace, it is first necessary for the public to care that indoor air quality affects them, and for the public to have easily identifiable means of assessing whether high standards are being met. This session will focus on public education programs about indoor air quality, incentive programs for building owners and operators, and the special case of public schools.
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| 10:40-11:10 | Coffee Break The Forum Foyer |
| 11:10-12:25 | Providing quality indoor air across the US (15 minutes each, 15 minutes Q&A) Moderator: Dr. Monica Schoch-Spana, Senior Scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security This session will focus on levers used to increase air quality across the US, and potential mechanisms, like model legislation, which could be explored to promote indoor air quality. What have been the most successful approaches? Who were the main stakeholders that ensured the success of local measures? What were the lessons learned?
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| 12:25-1:30 | Lunch The Forum Foyer |
| 1:30-2:45 | Providing quality indoor air: international perspectives (15 minutes each, 15 minutes Q&A) Moderator: Dr. Paula Olsiewski, Contributing Scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security This session will focus on levers used to increase air quality in other nations, as well as international standards.
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| 2:45-3:05 | Coffee Break The Forum Foyer |
| 3:05-4:20 | Catalyzing Indoor Air Quality: Science and Technology innovation (15 minutes each, 15 minutes Q&A) Moderator: Dr. William Bahnfleth, Professor, Architectural Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University This session will focus on the development of opportunities to drive innovation in support of high-quality indoor air and reductions in disease transmission.
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| 4:20-4:30 | Closing Remarks Dr. Gigi Kwik Gronvall, Senior Scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Dr. Paula Olsiewski, Contributing Scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security |
| 4:30-6:00 | Reception The West Gallery |
Professional Biographies
Joseph Allen, PhD
Dr. Joseph Allen is an associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings Program. He is the coauthor of Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity, which was recognized as a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times and Fortune magazine. During the pandemic, Dr. Allen has served as Commissioner of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission and Chair of its Safe Work, Safe Schools, and Safe Travel Task Force.
An internationally renowned expert and sought-after advisor, Dr. Allen works with senior executives at Fortune 500 companies across major sectors of the economy to implement healthy buildings strategies. He has authored more than 80 peer-reviewed scientific papers and regularly contributes to the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic.
William Bahnfleth, PhD, PE
Dr. William Bahnfleth is a professor of Architectural Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. He is a Fellow of ASHRAE, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the International Society for Indoor Air Quality and Climate. Dr. Bahnfleth holds a doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois and is a registered professional engineer. His primary research interest is energy efficient control of indoor air quality with a focus on control of bioaerosols with germicidal ultraviolet light. Dr. Bahnfleth is the author or co-author of more than 180 journal articles and 15 books and book chapters. He has served ASHRAE in many capacities, including as 2013-14 Society President and Chair of the ASHRAE Epidemic Task Force. His ASHRAE awards include the Exceptional Service Award, the Louise and Bill Holladay Distinguished Fellow Award, the E.K. Campbell Award of Merit for teaching, and the F. Paul Anderson Award, ASHRAE’s highest individual honor. His work as Chair of the ASHRAE Epidemic Task Force has been recognized with a letter of appreciation from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the ASHRAE Presidential Certificate of Honor.
Congressman Don Beyer
Congressman Don Beyer is currently serving his fourth term in the US House of Representatives, representing Northern Virginia suburbs of the nation’s capital. Rep. Beyer serves as Chair of the US Congress Joint Economic Committee, and he is a member of the House Committee on Ways and Means and the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, where he chairs the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics. Previously, Rep. Beyer served as Lieutenant Governor of Virginia and Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, and he has built a successful family business over the course of four decades.
Lars Ekberg, MSc, PhD
Dr. Lars Ekberg is an adjunct professor in Indoor Climate Technology at the Division of Building Services Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. He also works as a consultant at one of the subsidiaries of Chalmers Industriteknik, CIT Energy Management AB.
Dr. Ekberg’s research is focused on the chain of issues from human needs and wishes, via formulation of requirements to the design, construction, and management of healthy, comfortable, and energy-efficient buildings. He works over a wide spectrum, with residential buildings on one end, and advanced laboratories with very stringent requirements on the other.
Luca Fontana, MSc
Luca Fontana, an environmental toxicologist, epidemiologist working on health science and infection prevention and control, is currently Technical Officer, Emergency Programme, World Health Organization.
Since 2013, he has been contributing to preparedness and response for major outbreaks, including Ebola, Plague, Cholera, SARS-CoV-2, amongst others. His main expertise is the design and management of infectious disease treatment centers with a focus on engineering and environmental control measures. He led and contributed to several WHO publications including structural design of health facilities, the use of indoor ventilation as a risk reduction measure, and multiple IPC guidance focused on infectious diseases. One of his main areas of work is the strengthening of a multidisciplinary and holistic approach to emergency preparedness and response for infectious diseases by bridging engineering and building environment with the medical field.
Gigi Gronvall, PhD
Dr. Gigi Gronvall is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is an immunologist by training.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, she has led the Center’s ongoing efforts to track the development and marketing of molecular and antigen tests and serology tests, as well as the development of national strategies for COVID-19 serology (antibody) tests and SARS-CoV-2 serosurveys in the United States. She also has written about the scientific response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the contested origin of SARS-CoV-2, and the implications for national and international security.
Dr. Gronvall is the author of Synthetic Biology: Safety, Security, and Promise. In the book, she describes what can be done to minimize technical and social risks and maximize the benefits of synthetic biology, focusing on biosecurity, biosafety, ethics, and US national competitiveness—important sectors of national security. Dr. Gronvall is also the author of Preparing for Bioterrorism: The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Leadership in Biosecurity. Through her description of major grants that represented the foundation’s investments in civilian preparedness, public health law, law enforcement, air filtering in buildings, influenza preparedness, and business preparedness, she constructed, for a nontechnical audience, a chronicle of early gains in US efforts to confront the threat of bioterrorism.
Dr. Gronvall is a member of the Novel and Exceptional Technology and Research Advisory Committee, which provides recommendations to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and is a public forum for the discussion of the scientific, safety, and ethical issues associated with emerging biotechnologies. From 2010 to 2020, Dr. Gronvall was a member of the Threat Reduction Advisory Committee, which provided the Secretary of Defense with independent advice and recommendations on reducing the risk to the United States, its military forces, and its allies and partners posed by nuclear, biological, chemical, and conventional threats. During 2014-2015, she led a preparatory group that examined the US government response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa as a case study for the Department of Defense’s strategic role in health security and made recommendations for future Department of Defense actions in response to disease outbreaks. She served as the Science Advisor for the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism from April 2009 until the Commission ended in February 2010. She has testified before the US Congress about the safety and security of high-containment biological laboratories and served on several task forces related to laboratory and pathogen security. Dr. Gronvall has investigated and presented policy recommendations on the governance of science to the Biological Weapons Convention in Geneva, Switzerland.
In addition to being a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dr. Gronvall is an Associate Editor of the journal Health Security and a founding member of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Prior to joining the faculty, she worked at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. She was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Associate at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Dr. Gronvall received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University for work on T-cell receptor/MHC I interactions and worked as a protein chemist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. She received a BS in biology from Indiana University, Bloomington.
Ashish Jha, MD
A practicing physician, Dr. Ashish K. Jha serves as the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, appointed by US President Joe Biden. In his former role, he served as Dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University. He is recognized globally as an expert on pandemic preparedness and response as well as domestic and global health policy. Dr. Jha has led groundbreaking research on Ebola and has been a trusted voice on the COVID-19 response, leading national and international analysis of key issues and advising state and federal policymakers.
Dr. Jha joined Brown in 2020 after leading the Harvard Global Health Institute and teaching at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. He has practiced for nearly two decades at Veterans Affairs hospitals, providing direct clinical care to veterans.
Dr. Jha has published more than 250 original research publications in leading medical and health policy journals and is a frequent contributor to a range of public media. His research focuses primarily on the impact of public health policy on health outcomes and healthcare spending, both domestically and globally.
Born in Pursaulia, Bihar, India, Dr. Jha moved to Toronto, Canada, in 1979 and to the United States in 1983. He graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University with a BA in economics, earned his MD from Harvard Medical School, and received an MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He has been a member of the National Academy of Medicine since 2013.
Kerry Kinney, PhD
Dr. Kerry Kinney is the L.P. Gilvin Centennial Professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural & Environmental Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. She also has a courtesy appointment in the Department of Population Health at the Dell Medical School. Dr. Kinney’s cross-disciplinary research in environmental engineering and molecular biology centers on the investigation of microorganisms and contaminants in engineered systems including buildings, residential water systems, and municipal wastewater systems. She has extensive experience working with multidisciplinary teams to investigate human exposure to microorganisms and contaminants in the indoor environment.
Over the last decade, Dr. Kinney’s research group has explored the microorganisms, allergens, and contaminants found in schools, homes, and other buildings. These studies have led to a greater understanding of the conditions that promote fungal growth in buildings, new indoor sampling strategies (e.g., filter forensics), and insights into the relationships between indoor exposures and health.
Most recently, Dr. Kinney is working with researchers across UT Austin on the Whole Communities–Whole Health Bridging Barriers Initiative. She also serves on the steering committee for the Center for Health and Environment: Education and Research at Dell Med and is President Elect (and member of the Academy) of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate.
Kazukiyo Kumagai, PhD (invited)
Dr. Kazukiyo Kumagai is currently Chief of the Indoor Air Quality Section of the California Department of Public Health. Dr. Kumagai has worked for more than 20 years in the environmental science field, focused on air quality monitoring, human exposure to environmental and occupational pollution, exposure and/or effects of pollution on human health in indoor and controlled environments, and research driven by air quality policy.
His recent research support is from the Japanese government (specifically the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism; Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry; and Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan), several foundations (including Nissan), Sumitomo Environmental, and more than 50 private Japanese companies.
Dr. Kumagai is also a guest professor at Kyushu University in Japan, as well as a member of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate; American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers; and other major organizations focused on indoor and outdoor atmospheric environments.
Dr. Kumagai holds a BEng and MEng in architectural engineering from Tokyo University of Science, Japan; an MPH in environmental health from the Institute of Public Health, Japan; and a PhD in environmental science from the University of Tokyo.
Donald K. Milton, MD, DrPH
Dr. Donald K. Milton is a Professor of Environmental Health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, with a secondary appointment in the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Department of Medicine. An internationally recognized expert on the aerobiology of respiratory viruses, Dr. Milton developed the concept of using indoor CO2 to directly measure rebreathed air and airborne infection risk. He is the Principal Investigator of the UMD StopCOVID study (investigating SARS-CoV-2 transmission) and of the newly NIH-funded Evaluating Modes of Transmission (EMIT-2) study, a 5-year, $15 million UMD-UMB collaboration to perform randomized controlled trials that will define the modes and mechanisms of influenza transmission.
Dr. Milton graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County with a BA in chemistry in 1976 and obtained his MD from Johns Hopkins University in 1980. He went on to obtain a Master of Occupational Health and DrPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 1985 and 1989, respectively.
Cath Noakes, OBE, PhD, FREng, FIMechE, FIHEEM, FISIAQ
Dr. Cath Noakes is a chartered mechanical engineer, with a background in fluid dynamics. She gained her PhD in Computational Fluid Dynamics in 2000 from the University of Leeds, and has remained at Leeds since, becoming a Professor in the School of Civil Engineering in 2014. She leads research into ventilation, indoor air quality, and infection control in the built environment using experimental and modelling-based studies. She is co-director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Fluid Dynamics and Deputy Director of the Leeds Institute for Fluid Dynamics. From April 2020-2022 she co-chaired the Environment and Modelling sub-group of the UK Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), focusing on the science underpinning environmental transmission of COVID-19. She also has contributed to multiple working groups focusing on respiratory transmission, including for the WHO, the NHS, the UK and Scottish Governments, various professional bodies, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Alejandra Nunez, SJD, LLM, LLB
Alejandra Nunez is the Deputy Assistant Administrator for Mobile Sources, Office of Air and Radiation at the US Environmental Protection Agency. Prior to being appointed to her current position at the EPA, she served as a senior attorney at the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program, where her work focused on litigation and regulatory advocacy on federal greenhouse gas and corporate average fuel economy standards for light- and heavy-duty vehicles, carbon dioxide standards for new and existing power plants, state transportation and clean energy policies, and the integration of environmental justice in climate policy. Before Sierra Club, she worked as associate counsel at the World Bank’s Legal Vice Presidency, where she advised on public-private partnerships in the energy and water infrastructure sectors, and was also an associate at Morrison & Foerster, where she represented clients on public trust issues, carbon sequestration projects, and conservation easements.
Paula Olsiewski, PhD
Dr. Paula Olsiewski is a Contributing Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. She is a pioneering leader in policy and scientific research programs in the microbiology and chemistry of indoor environments.
During her two decades at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, she led innovative and multidisciplinary programs that inspired, accelerated, and produced lasting impact. Her expertise in partnering with academic, governmental, and for-profit stakeholders fostered innovation and built research capacity through the creation of diverse stakeholder networks. Her accomplishments include the creation and direction of the microbiology of the built environment, chemistry of indoor environments, and biosecurity programs.
Dr. Olsiewski is recognized as a leading expert in biosecurity and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is Chair of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Homeland Security Research Subcommittee and is a member of the EPA Board of Scientific Counselors Executive Committee. She is also a member of the NTI|bio Working Group for Biosecurity Innovation and Risk Reduction Initiative and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in chemistry.
Dr. Olsiewski’s acumen in board governance, recruitment and development, and fundraising has helped both scientific and philanthropic organizations improve their operational efficacy and programmatic outcomes. Early in her career, Dr. Olsiewski was Vice President of Product Development at Enzo Biochem and President of Neo/Tech Corp. She is an active board member of the Critical Path Institute, an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the drug development and regulatory process. She is also Vice Chair of the Spondylitis Association of America and was board chair of Asphalt Green—a not-for-profit organization in New York that encourages a lifetime of participation in sports and fitness.
Dr. Olsiewski received a PhD in biological chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As an alumna, she was a member of the MIT Corporation and President of the MIT Alumni Association, earning her the association’s top honor: the Bronze Beaver award. Dr. Olsiewski was a member of MIT’s Initiative for Faculty Race and Diversity Advisory Committee and is an advocate for diversity and ongoing supporter of MIT's Women in Chemistry. She also received a BS in chemistry, cum laude, from Yale.
Kimberly Prather, PhD
Dr. Kimberly Prather is an Atmospheric Chemist, Distinguished Chair in Atmospheric Chemistry, and a Distinguished Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California San Diego. Her work focuses on how human emissions are influencing the atmosphere, climate, and human health. In April 2020, she was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in honor of outstanding contributions to aerosol chemistry. In 2019, she was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She is an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Prather is working to understand the health and environmental impacts of ocean-derived pollutants and toxins in run-off and outfalls. Her work focuses on studying the ocean-to-atmosphere transfer of pollutants and subsequent atmospheric transport and extent of human exposure. Her research specifically focuses on measurements of the concentration of particles that are small enough to be fully inhaled and impact human health. This new area of research can be used for alerting the public and predicting days with heavier airborne pollution and bacterial loads, especially during storm events that wash contaminants into coastal oceans, where they can then become airborne. She is working collaboratively with a team of interdisciplinary scientists to study the potential health effects of these ocean-derived natural microbes and anthropogenic pollutants under changing climate conditions.
Chris Pyke, PhD
Dr. Chris Pyke is an environmental scientist and the Senior Vice President for Arc Skoru—part of the US Green Building Council family of organizations. Arc helps spaces, buildings, and places in more than 132 countries benchmark real world sustainability performance. Prior to joining Arc, Dr. Pyke led research for the US Green Building Council, served as Chief Strategy Officer for Aclima, and contributed to the global growth of GRESB as Chief Operating Officer. Dr. Pyke is on the faculty of the Urban and Regional Planning Program at Georgetown University. He holds a PhD and MA from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Ana María Rule, PhD, MHS
Dr. is an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she obtained her Master of Occupational Health in 1996 and her PhD in Environmental Health Sciences in 2005. Dr. Rule is an expert in exposure assessment of airborne environmental and occupational hazards, including in agricultural, urban, and nosocomial environments. She has led projects to evaluate exposures to biological aerosols, electronic cigarettes, as well as indoor and outdoor air pollution. Dr. Rule’s main research goal is the development and evaluation of novel sampling and analysis strategies for the assessment of exposure to air pollutants. She is currently Director of the Environmental Exposure Assessment Lab, where she develops and applies methods for the assessment of exposures to adult and pediatric populations. She has experience working in multidisciplinary projects that involve collaboration with researchers from other disciplines and is passionate about addressing the root-causes of environmental justice.
Monica Schoch-Spana, PhD
Dr. Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist, is a Senior Scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a Senior Scientist in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Since 1998, she has focused her public health career on generating and applying evidence to advise policymakers and practitioners on how to collaborate with private citizens, businesses, and faith- and community-based groups in efforts to manage catastrophic health events, both effectively and equitably. Her areas of expertise include community resilience to disaster, public engagement in policymaking, crisis and emergency risk communication, and public health emergency management (readiness/response/recovery).
During the COVID-19 pandemic response, Dr. Schoch-Spana has worked diligently to translate social scientific insights into actionable recommendations for policymakers and practitioners, including most recently as co-Principal Investigator for CommuniVax—a national ethnographic research coalition whose expert advisory group and 6 local teams are partnering with communities of color to tackle COVID-19 vaccine access and acceptance issues and to put equity at the center of the pandemic recovery process. She has also collaborated in generating an ethical framework for the allocation of COVID-19 vaccines, advanced understanding of the pandemic’s mental health challenges, contributed to decision-making guidance for governors on safe reopening strategies, consulted on crisis standards of care and their communication to the public, and spotlighted the need for a transformative pandemic recovery process focused on the whole person.
Dr. Schoch-Spana’s national advisory roles include currently serving on the Homeland Security Subcommittee of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the US Environmental Protection Agency and on the Resilient America Roundtable of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), which she also formerly cochaired. She also serves on the NASEM Committee on Community Engagement in Southeast Texas: Pilot Project to Enhance Community Capacity and Resilience to Floods and on the NASEM Committee that planned the March 2022 workshop, “Building Public Trust in Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response (PHEPR) Science.”
Dr. Schoch-Spana has helped guide the direction of policy and practice in public health emergency management such that planning and operations are more behaviorally realistic and contribute to health equity; public health communicators are better equipped to meet the population’s informational needs in an emergency; citizens have more venues to contribute their practical, intellectual, and ethical inputs to readiness and response endeavors; and national and local communities are striving to withstand and learn from disasters, rather than merely respond to them.
From 2003 to 2017, Dr. Schoch-Spana worked at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Health Security; prior to that she worked at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, starting in 1998. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Johns Hopkins University and a BA from Bryn Mawr College.
Brett Singer, PhD
Dr. Brett C. Singer is the Head of the Sustainable Energy and Environmental Systems Department and Co-lead of the Indoor Environment Group in the Energy Technologies Area of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Singer has more than 25 years of experience conceiving, conducting, and leading research studies of air pollutant emissions and the physical-chemical processes and controls that impact exposures in varied building types. A major focus of Dr. Singer’s work has been the goal of accelerating new building standards and retrofit practices to decarbonize the sector and improve energy performance, resilience, and indoor environmental conditions. His research also addresses low-energy systems for filtration, smart ventilation, and exposure mitigation. Dr. Singer earned MS and PhD degrees in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and a BS in engineering from Temple University.
Pawel Wargocki, PhD
Dr. Pawel Wargocki is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Engineering and the Department of Civil Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark, DTU. He has more than 25 years of experience in research on human requirements in indoor environments. He is best known for his seminal work demonstrating that poor indoor environmental quality affects the performance of office work and learning. Other work influenced requirements for ventilation and air cleaning. Recent research includes studies on human emissions, sleep quality, the development of the IEQ rating schemes, and the performance of green buildings.
Dr. Wargocki has collaborated with leading research institutions, universities, and industrial partners worldwide, such as the National University of Singapore, Jiaotong University in Shanghai, Syracuse Center of Excellence, United Technologies, and Google. He was President and a long-standing Board Member of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate (ISIAQ); President of ISIAQ Academy of Fellows (previously Academy of Indoor Air Sciences); Vice President of the Indoor Air 2008 conference; and Chair of ASHRAE committees. He has received several awards for his work, including the Rockwool Award for Young Researchers, ASHRAE Ralph Nevins Award, ISIAQ’s Yaglou Award, and the Indoor Air Journal Best Paper Award. He is published extensively. Dr. Wargocki received his PhD from the Technical University of Denmark in 1998 and graduated from Warsaw University of Technology in Poland.
Jason Wilbur, MSc, MBA
Jason Wilbur is the Executive Vice President and Co-Founder of Silver Falls Capital and President of Omni CleanAir. Omni CleanAir is critically focused on eliminating illnesses caused by unhealthy air through scientifically proven air purification solutions for indoor commercial spaces (medical facilities, office spaces, educational facilities), industrial environments (abatement, construction), and indoor agricultural environments. For more than 30 years, Omni CleanAir has kept professionals safe from the most dangerous airborne pathogens and pollutants and continues to develop innovative solutions to clean the air we breathe.
Mr. Wilbur has a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Iowa, a Master of Engineering degree from the California Institute of Technology, and an MBA from Arizona State University. Prior to Omni CleanAir, Mr. Wilbur worked for several Fortune 100 public companies, including Honeywell and Danaher.