Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters inside our buildings and out.
This Podcast is about Indoor Air Quality, Outdoor Air Quality, Ventilation, and Health in our homes, workplaces, and education settings.
And we already have many of the tools we need to make a difference.
The conversations we have and how we share this knowledge is the key to our success.
We speak with the leaders at the heart of this sector about them and their work, innovation and where this is all going.
Air quality is the single most significant environmental risk we face to our health and wellbeing, and its impacts on us, our friends, our families, and society are profound.
From housing to the workplace, education to healthcare, the quality of the air we breathe matters.
Air Quality Matters
Episodes
110 episodes
#84 - Sarah Daly: Building Better: The Future of Sustainable Housing and Healthy Buildings
The gap between what we know and what we build has never been more troubling. While we have centuries of construction knowledge at our fingertips, today's housing often fails at the most fundamental levels of health, comfort, and efficiency.
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Episode 84
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1:07:17
One Take #12 - Pandemic Air Math: When Average Just Won't Cut It
We explore the scientific approach behind ASHRAE Standard 241, developed to address airborne infection control in buildings during profound uncertainty. The standard represents a paradigm shift in how engineers design ventilation systems to man...
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10:49
#83 - Andrew Sutton: The Long Game: Quality, Risk, and Scaling Sustainable Housing
Simon Jones sits down with Andrew Sutton, co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at SERO, to explore the challenges and opportunities in retrofitting UK housing stock and how these parallel the challenges in ventilation and air quality.
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1:25:33
One Take #11 - Turning Low-Cost Air Quality Sensors into Compliance Tools
Lidia Morawska's paper provides a pragmatic framework for using low-cost PM2.5 sensors in regulatory indoor air quality monitoring, solving the longstanding problem of affordable compliance without sacrificing accuracy. This clever calibr...
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8:41
#82 - Vinod Kumar Sekar: From Healthcare to Hyderabad: Hosting ISIAC 2025
Microbiologist Vinod Kumar Sikar shares his journey of bridging the gap between microbiology and engineering to improve indoor air quality, particularly in healthcare settings throughout India. He explains how the Healthy Buildings Conference c...
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Episode 82
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1:20:28
One Take #10 - Invisible Danger, Visible Results: Democratizing Radon Measurement
Can you trust those affordable radon detectors? Do you really need to wait a whole year to know if your home has dangerous radon levels? The latest episode of Air Quality Matters tackles these critical questions through a deep dive into...
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8:54
#81 - Nathan Wood: The Ventilation Crisis Nobody's Talking About And How We Fix It?
"The lungs of our buildings are failing us." These sobering words from ventilation expert Nathan Wood capture the essence of a critical conversation about the silent crisis happening behind our walls. After inspecting countless vent...
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Episode 81
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1:34:54
One Take #9 - What Makes People Actually Use Air Quality Apps
What makes someone download an air quality monitoring app and actually keep using it? The answer might surprise you. In this eye-opening exploration of a fascinating study from Indonesia, we dive deep into the psychology behind env...
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9:35
#80 Abigail Whitehouse: When a child can't breathe, everything else stops.
What really happens in a child's body during a severe asthma attack? Dr. Abigail Whitehouse, pediatric respiratory consultant, takes us on a sobering journey through the physiology of asthma, beginning with a paramedic's memory of a late-night ...
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Episode 80
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1:26:06
One Take #8 - Passive House Reality Check
Gabriel Rojas and colleagues' comprehensive review examines indoor air quality in over 600 Passive Houses, revealing that properly-designed mechanical ventilation systems generally outperform conventional housing for background pollutants like ...
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11:27
#79 - Stefan Flagner: Clean Air Economics
The economic value of healthy buildings represents one of the greatest untapped frontiers in our quest for better indoor environments. While we've mastered the technical aspects of creating healthier spaces, convincing decision-makers to invest...
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Episode 79
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1:39:21
One Take #7 - Formaldehyde, Damp, and Mold in English Housing
We dive into a fascinating paper that quantifies respiratory disease burden from formaldehyde, damp and mold in English housing. Using Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) as a metric, researchers reveal the hidden health costs of poor housin...
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9:06
#78 Rob McLeod: 1,200 Classrooms Later: What We Learned About Air Quality in Schools ImpAQS
The landmark ImpAQS study examining ventilation and air quality in 1,200 Austrian schools reveals widespread failure to meet minimum standards, with at least 25% of classrooms unable to maintain acceptable CO2 levels during operational hours.&n...
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Episode 78
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1:44:10
One Take #6 - Maternal Air Pollution Exposure: How It Shapes Your Child's Respiratory Future
Research reveals that a mother's exposure to air pollution during pregnancy could significantly increases her child's risk of developing asthma, suggesting that our respiratory health journey begins before we take our first breath. ...
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7:51
#77 - Robert Bean: The Human Element and Building Better Spaces
Indoor environmental quality is about more than just air quality – it encompasses everything our sensory systems experience within built environments. This knowledge provides a framework for creating healthier, more human-centered buildings.
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Episode 77
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1:56:00
One Take #5 Clean Air, Full Classes
Research establishes a direct link between classroom air quality and student attendance rates through a comprehensive study of 144 classrooms across 31 Midwestern elementary schools. The findings provide compelling evidence that improved ventil...
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9:54
#76 - Erik Malmstrom: The Invisible Made Visible: Tracking Pathogens Through Buildings
Imagine if you could actually see how viruses and bacteria move through the air in a building. That's exactly what Safe Traces technology allows us to do, and the implications for public health and building performance are profound. In this eye...
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1:50:21
One Take #4 :Indoor Air Crisis in Global Social Housing
What happens when the air inside your home is slowly making you sick? For millions of people living in social housing across developing nations, this isn't a hypothetical question—it's daily reality.A review published in Applied Science...
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9:45
#75 - Sarah Gudeman: The Human Side of Sustainable Engineering
What distinguishes a truly healthy building from one that simply meets minimum code requirements? In this conversation with Sarah Gudeman, Principal and Practice Lead at Branch Pattern, we explore the critical intersection where engineering exp...
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Episode 75
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1:46:47
One Take #3 - Beyond the Comfy Chair: Home indoor air quality and cognitive function over one
Ever wondered why you sometimes struggle to focus when working from home? We dive into fascinating new research that connects the invisible elements of our home environments to how well our brains function during remote work.This episod...
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13:33
#74 - Joseph Allen: Communicating science and turning in buildings into health assets
What if the air you breathe at work is silently shaping your performance, creativity, and health? Harvard's Dr. Joseph Allen has become the leading voice connecting building science with human potential - showing how something as simple as bett...
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Episode 74
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1:50:53
One Take #2 - Experimental analysis to quantify inactivation of microorganisms by Far-UVC
Imagine a technology that could silently work in the background, destroying harmful microbes in the air we breathe without harming us. That's the promise of Far-UVC light at 222 nanometers, and groundbreaking room-scale research just brought th...
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10:49
#73 - Olivia Swann & Dan Bowers: Echo Chambers and Interlopers: Breaking Down Built Environment Barriers
What happens when a pediatrician who codes and a psychologist studying technology acceptance walk into a built environment conference? Sometimes the most illuminating perspectives come from the margins.In this episode, I sit down with D...
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Episode 73
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1:08:55
One Take #1: Ten questions concerning the future of residential indoor air quality and its environmental justice implications
We explore a paper examining the future of residential air quality and its environmental justice implications. This research highlights how poor indoor air quality disproportionately affects disadvantaged communities, creating a "triple jeopard...
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7:34
#72 - John Wenger: Hydroxyl Radicals: Nature's Invisible Engine Room, Ambient Air and more
Have you ever wondered what's really happening in the air around us? In this captivating conversation with Professor John Wenger of University College Cork, we dive into the hidden chemistry that shapes our atmosphere and affects our health in ...
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Episode 72
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1:41:03