Postdoctoral Funding Opportunity in Microbiology of the Built Environment

(The following information is taken from the full RFP which is attached here) The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announces a funding opportunity in its Microbiology of the Built Environment (MoBE) program. The Foundation seeks to further the development of talented early stage Ph.D. scientists and engineers through the Microbiology of the Built Environment (MoBE) Postdoctoral …

Cutting-edge technology for “sniffing” microbial volatiles coming to BIMERC as part of Sloan grant renewal

Posting a note from my [gleeful] chemistry colleagues Allen Goldstein and Pawel Misztal about the new instrument that is headed our way.  BIMERC will soon receive an exceptionally unique and powerful Proton Transfer Reaction Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer (PTR-ToF-MS 8000) for instantaneous detection of a full range gas-phase organics including microbial volatile organic compounds (MVOC). There …

Sloan grant renewed for BIMERC

We got the great news that the Sloan Foundation has funded the proposal to continue the Berkeley Indoor Microbial Ecology Research Consortium. BIMERC is a collaboration of UC Berkeley scientists with a goal “to understand the microbial ecology of the build environment through interdisciplinary research that combines microbial biology, particle transport physics, chemistry, and architecture.” …

Talks uploaded from Sloan Conference on Microbiology of the Built Environment

Well only a mere couple of months after the 2nd Annual Sloan Conference on the Microbiology of the Built Environment Conference ended I’ve finally gotten all of the talks up onto YouTube.   There’s a few missing (opted out or technical problems) but most of them are there.  It was a great and informative series of …

Size matters, or what I learned from collaborating with environmental engineers

The Sloan Foundation recently convened grantees for the 2nd Conference on the Microbiology of the Built Environment, and the opening talk focused on the benefits of collaboration. Carlos Rodriguez reminded us (I’m paraphrasing), “When you look at problems in silos, you find solutions in silos. But when you look at problems across disciplines, you find …

Meeting Report: Sloan Conference on the Microbiology of the Built Environment (May 22-24th 2013)

This meeting is an annual gathering to bring together all of the Sloan grantees, their labs, and other stakeholders in the field to discuss the status of the microbiology of the built environment program.   Thanks again to Mark Hernandez and Alina Handorean for all their hard work in putting it together.  Note that I will …

New Sloan-funded program in the built environment: Microbial diversity in 1,000 homes across the United States

Another just-approved project in the built environment.   This project led by Noah Fierer (CU Boulder), Shelly Miller (CU Boulder) and Rob Dunn (North Carolina State) will look at the factors structuring bacterial and fungal diversity in 1,000 homes across the United States. We propose the first continental-scale study testing how and why house-associated microbial communities …

New Sloan-funded project in the built environment: airborne microbiome before/after weatherization, Largus Angenent

The Sloan Foundation today announced funding for a pilot study looking at the effects of weatherization on the indoor airborne microbiome.  This work will be performed by Largus Angenent at Cornell University.  The full summary of the project is below: The U.S. Department of Energy has instituted a weatherization program aimed at making homes more …

Update on Sloan RFP PRocess

The Sloan Foundation review process for proposals dealing with the microbiology of the built environment deadline has been extended from June 15th until the first week of July.  Full text below:   Dear Colleague − Due to the large number of submissions in response to the March 27, 2012 call for letters of intent, the …

Sloan Meeting on microbiology of the built environment #microBEnet

More detail on the Sloan Meeting on “Microbiology of the Built Environment,” via storify: ———————– UPDATE February 2019 Storify is no longer in existence. Fortunately we were able to convert the Storify summary to one via Wakelet. Wakelet details: Link to Wakelet Site: Sloan Meeting on microbiology of the built environment #microBEnet PDF of Wakelet …