News
The Cost of Cool
The New York Times article “The Cost of Cool” explains the downside of air-conditioners: “Air-conditioners draw copious electricity, and deliver a double whammy in terms of climate change, since both the electricity they use and the coolants they contain result in...
Report from “The Great Indoors”
BioBE scientists recently participated in a special session held at the 97th Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Portland, Oregon. The session (titled “The Great Indoors: Recent Advances in the Ecology of Built Environments”) was co-organized...
Ecology of the Built Environment at Portland ESA Meeting
Brendan Bohannan and Thomas Bruns have organized a session at the upcoming Ecological Society of America meeting in Portland titled, "The Great Indoors: Recent Advances in the Ecology of Built Environments." Here's the session description: “[We] are basically an...
Healthy Buildings 2012
Graduate Research Fellow, Gwynne Mhuireach, discussed current BioBE Center research on potential links between sustainable building design and indoor microbial communities at Healthy Buildings 2012 in Brisbane Australia, July 8 - 12. Ventilation rates and methods are...
Discover Mag talks with BioBE
“Earth’s Last Unexplored Wilderness: Your Very Own Home” in the July-August 2012 issue of Discover Magazine features the BioBE Center and other prominent labs leading the investigation of the indoor microbiome. Members of BioBE talk about center projects including The...
The Nature of Cities
The recently launched Nature of Cities collective blog looks fantastic. From the contributors: The Nature of Cities is a collective of contributors, an essay site devoted to cities as ecological spaces. Cities are fundamentally ecological spaces. They are...
Microbiology of the Built Environment Meeting in Boulder
The BioBE Center took part in the Inaugural Conference on the Microbiology of the Built Environment in at CU Boulder, May 31 - June 1. Jessica Green, Gwynne Mhuireach, and Steve Kembel presented recent work conducted in the Lillis Business Building and discussed...
UO Biology students lead conversation on Green Rooftops
Undergraduates in Jessica Green's Biological Diversity course are leading TED Conversations this term. The most recent conversation was focused on the built environment with the question: if green roofs were mandatory in cities would there be less development and...
Indoor Ecology featured at TEDxPortland
TEDxPortland invited the BioBE Center to speak about indoor ecology and our most recent research at the Lillis Business Complex. This event was extraordinary. Featured speakers included architect Gene Sandoval who designed the award winning John E. Jacqua Academic...
BioBE Center at TEDMED 2012
BioBE Center members Jessica Green and Keith Herkert were granted Front-Line Scholarships to attend the TEDMED conference from April 10-13. We made many new connections with some amazing and inspiring individuals. More innovative ideas are on the horizon for BioBE...
BioBE Center at TED 2012
The BioBE Center is working with the Autodesk Dasher Project to visualize microbiological data in the built environment. Go here for a brief demo of Jessica Green interfacing with Project Dasher at TED2012.
BioBE Center Featured in Science
In the February 10 issue of Science, reporter Courtney Humphries profiles the growing community of scientists investigating the built environment microbiome. The article features Sloan Foundation Program Officer Paula Olsiewski, BioBE Director Jessica Green, and...
BioBE makes top 10 at ISME Journal
The BioBE center's recent paper is among The ISME Journal's top 10 most downloaded papers of the past 30 days. It is exciting to see such broad interest in the intersection of architecture and biology!
Caitlin Smith Takes Top Honors
As mentioned a few weeks ago, high school sophomore Caitlin Smith presented her study of domestic microbes at the Dallastown science fair on January 28. Caitlin's work earned her a First Place ranking and advanced her to the county science fair next month....
BioBE Center: now in Print
The BioBE Center's inaugural article was published today in The ISME Journal (available online via Open Access). In it, Kembel et al. report the influence of architectural design on airborne microbial communities in a Portland-area hospital. As compared to outdoor...
Biology and the built environment center
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