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PhD candidate Emma Biesada preparing media to grow coronavirus.

Research faculty Sara Beck counts live virus recovered from aerosols.

Research faculty Odessa Mason Gomez operates a full scale bioaerosol chamber for disinfection studies.

Post-doctoral fellow Mariana Lopes and Industry Collaborator Pete McKinney set up ventilation equipment that disinfects airborne virus.

CU Environmental Engineering Microbiology and Disinfection Lab Research Team

PhD candidate Marina Nieto Caballero cultivates coronavirus on brain cell media.

Research faculty Dr. Odessa Gomez prepares Impactors to determine size distribution of airborne Coronavirus.

Practical instrumentation to monitor and mitigate what we breathe.

Aerobiology Technician Blaire Volbers works with grad student Alise Gladbach during annual sampling day for Metasub Urban Biome Microbiology project

Undergraduate student Sylvia Akol samples high contact surfaces in Denver hotels.

Odessa Gomez sets up CO2 monitors to evaluate ventilation and mixing in classrooms.

PhD candidate Nicollette Laroco with lab scale biogas experiments to utilize steel making residuals to remove biogas contaminantes such as H2S.

PhD Candidate Emma Biesiada assesses disinfection damage with the lab's microscope facility.

Post Doc Emily Kraus performs genomic analysis of airborne microbes.

CU Boulder Undergraduate Student Interns with Denver Public Schools Air Quality Project

CU Boulder Student Interns with Denver School Air Quality Project

Dr. Hernandez and Dr. Nieto Caballero explain their work on relative humidity and longevity of airborne COVID-19

Aerobiology & Disinfection Laboratory

Headshot Mark Hernandez is the S J Archuleta Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; he directs the Aerobiology and Disinfection Lab at the University of Colorado. This lab focuses on the characterization and control of microbiological air pollution and microbially induced corrosion. The lab develops genetic, biochemical and toxicological techniques to assess the efficacy of engineering interventions in sectors of sanitary engineering and industrial hygiene that are relevant to environmental health. There is special focus on aerobiology science for wide-area surveillance, indoor cleaning technology and the design of aerosol disinfection systems in the built environment.

Get a quick overview of our work here in .

Confronting COVID-19: Hernandez Lab School Ventilation Research

Aerobiology Lab CU Boulder

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Coronavirus Research in Our Lab

The Hernandez lab is optimizing large-scale aerosol disinfection systems and commercial cleaning protocols in ways that help mitigate the persistence of Coronavirus in the built environment.
With 25 years of research experience on the characterization and control of airborne microorganisms, the Hernandez lab has most recently been monitoring aerobiology in metropolitan mass transit systems around the world as well as in our local public schools.
After the pandemic surfaced in Wuhan, hospitals and industrial partners (Aerosol Devices, Clorox, Carrier, Denver Children's Hospital, Detection Tek, Reckitt Benckiser, and Tito's Handmade Vodka) approached the Hernandez lab to support disinfection and CoVID characterization studies.
We use classic methods for culturing mammalian viruses as well as emerging instrumentation from the Colorado tech sector to characterize the identity, distribution and infectious potential of indoor airborne microorganisms - notably including Coronavirus.

Broadening Participation

Dr. Hernandez has focused graduate and undergraduate recruiting efforts on students who are disabled or from socioeconomic groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in engineering education. We are a majority minority lab and everyone is welcome.

Graduate Students - Out of a total of mentees, the pool of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows formally mentored by Dr. Hernandez as a primary advisor includes women, and underrepresented students . Of these, 6 are tenured engineering faculty at the following institutions: Yale, Cornell, Boston University, Ohio State, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Shanghai Pudong University.

Undergraduate Students- Out of a total of 50 students, the pool of undergraduates formally mentored as an internship advisor includes women, and underrepresented students. Of these, more than 60% have gone on to complete a STEM graduate degree.

Learn more about his work to broaden participation in engineering education.

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