Presentation Summary

On a day-to-day basis, humans face exposure to a variety of contaminants in the indoor environment. Indoor surfaces have the potential to negatively impact indoor air quality due to their capacity to re-emit gas-phase contaminants and act as a medium for reactions that create new contaminants. Directly measuring indoor surfaces allows for a better understanding of how surfaces can impact indoor air quality. However, many studies that investigated the behavior of indoor surfaces do so indirectly or are limited to surface type. This presentation will provide a surface perspective on indoor air quality by giving an overview of current research on indoor surfaces, presenting new research on how physical properties of indoor surfaces and introducing the progress and preliminary results of a new method to measure understudied surfaces directly.

Presenter Bio

Rachel Greene is a Ph.D. Candidate in Analytical Chemistry at Colorado State University under Dr. Delphine Farmer. Her research focuses on the role surfaces have in indoor air quality, specifically the size of surface reservoirs and the partitioning behavior of surfaces. She uses a variety of analytical instruments adapted from material science and ecology in both lab and indoor field experiments to obtain direct measurements of indoor surfaces. Rachel earned a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry at George Washington University. Her undergraduate research involved improving ground-based measurements of greenhouse gases.