Targeting airborne infection risk with real-time detection

Real-time detection of human-origin pathogens in air systems and automatically minimising infection risks is one of the research goals of the $3.5 million+ ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship recipient QUT Distinguished Professor Lidia Morawska and her international team of scientists.

Morawska is globally recognised for her role in alerting the world to the fact that SARS-CoV-2 virus-laden airborne particles exhaled by COVID-19-infected people were a key source of transmission for the deadly disease from person to person through the air.

Calling upon her vast body of research and networks forged over three decades of air quality and health study, Morawska assembled and led 239 scientists from around the world to raise global recognition of virus-laden airborne particles as a major threat to public health.

In response, the World Health Organization updated its advice on airborne transmission, preventing millions of infections and deaths.

Her work is now considered one of four critical elements in fighting the pandemic and was recognised with the International Society of Air Quality’s Special 2020 Award for Extraordinary Academic Leadership.

Morawska also recently received a $5 million grant to lead the Australian Research Council (ARC) Training Centre for Advanced Building Systems Against Airborne Infection Transmission training centre to reduce airborne infections through improved indoor air quality for better public health.

In 2020 Morawska was admitted to the Australian Academy of Science and was named one of the TIME100 world’s most influential people in 2021, among the array of awards and accolades bestowed during the pandemic and her research career.

She established in 1993 the Environmental Aerosol Laboratory, which in 2002 became the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health (ILAQH) at QUT and in 2004 was named a WHO Collaborating Centre for air pollution and health, the only WHO centre dedicated to this topic in this region, led by Morawska.

Morawska has gathered an interdisciplinary team with a core of leading national and international experts from the US, Italy, the UK, UNSW, University of Melbourne, Spain and Canada as well as QUT medical engineers, mathematicians and architects.

“We spend more than 90% of our lives in buildings. We do not realise how complex their interior atmospheres can be. We waste much energy to maintain mediocre atmospheric quality, inadequate for many occupants, in our homes and building.

“We cannot detect pathogens to prevent us from inhaling them and our buildings do not respond to outdoor- and indoor-generated air pollution, to prevent pollutants from outside or their efficient removal.

“To address this, we have set out three technologies we will aim to achieve:

• To create the first reliable, cost-efficient, anonymised method for mapping indoors spaces in real time, to detect and locate people and detect the direction of airflow and how it mixes to provide personalised ventilation and thermal control.
• To create a real-time technique to detect human-origin pathogens in air systems and automatically minimise infection risks.
• A cost-efficient network to sense certain pollutants, for analysis to identify types of pollution sources (eg, combustion versus re-suspended dust) and origins both indoors or outdoors.”

Morawska said the fellowship research would be divided into four themes co-led by early and mid-career researchers to give them leadership opportunities in research and training and would comprise seven postgraduate positions in all.