Biodiversity of the "mute" button (credit: C. Smith) The BioBE Center has recently had the pleasure of collaborating with high school sophomore Caitlin Smith on her science fair project.  Caitlin, a student at Dallastown Area High School in Dallastown PA, contacted...

BioBE center member Terry Blomquist presented our work at the 2011 Oregon BEST Fest: “The Pacific Northwest’s premier expo and networking event for renewable energy and sustainable built environment research, development, and commercialization.” The conference served...

Pradeep Pillai, formerly of the Loreau and Gonzalez labs at McGill University, joined the BioBE Center in August to bring metacommunity theory to bear on microbes in the built environment. We look forward to working with Pradeep to elucidate the hidden dynamics of...

BioBE center members Brendan Bohannan and Ann Womack recently presented center-related research at the annual Ecological Society of America held in Austin, TX August 7-12. Read the abstract for Brendan's oral presentation here, and Ann's poster presentation abstract...

Mary-Charlotte and Jessica Green chat about microbes in the Santa Fe Baking Company before a Santa Fe Institute public lecture. Listen to the podcast here and related press coverage at the Santa Fe New Mexican.

A recent paper by Bowers and colleagues found that the composition of airborne bacteria in Midwestern cities is strongly tied to season but only weakly differentiated among sites and not correlated to local weather.  Microbes in the the group's samples were typically...

The NYT article "What's Left Behind" asks not what we can do for our vacant lots but what our vacant lots can do for us.  Open land can clean and replenish the watershed, absorb urban heat and carbon dioxide, and more.  Many of these ecosystem services are provided by...

The BioBE Center gathered biological, environmental, and architectural data at relatively small spatial scales within a Lillis Business Classroom yesterday.  This was our first time using microbiology-modified Whittaker plots in the built environment.  

Program officer Paula Olsiewski from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is visiting the BioBE Center today.  The Energy and Building Studies Laboratory (ESBL), which is the architecture arm of our Center, organized something special.  Paula went through the thought...

If microorganisms only cared about heat and light, is this how they would see Lillis when approaching from the atmosphere?

The BioBE Center got busy last month sampling air and dust in the University of Oregon Lillis Business Complex.  The fun has just begun.

Carl Zimmer's recent New York Times article on urban evolution underscores why an urban space can be viewed as "one great laboratory".  Most urban evolution research has been focused on plants and animals, or on specific microbial strains.  Soon urban microbiome...

What brings together research on the built environment microbiome and community art on abandon buildings?  Think about it, and check out the recent work of Candy Chang.

  Jessica Green presented BioBE Center research at TEDGlobal 2011.  This was the first time BioBE Center animation about the "Built Environment Microbiome", created in collaboration with XVIVO, has been shown publicly.  Highlights of the meeting included TED...