'Unlocking COVID-19 through Open Access' with Shelly Miller

Shelly Miller: "When we realized that COVID-19 was spreading rapidly through the community, we realized quickly that outbreaks are happening from singing and large groups, in poorly ventilated spaces."

Melissa Cantrell: “Shelly Miller is a professor of Mechanical Engineering at CU Boulder and faculty in the Environmental Engineering Program. She studies Urban and Indoor air quality, particulate pollution, and controls for improving indoor environmental air quality.

"Her paper ‘Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by inhalation of respiratory aerosol in the Skagit Valley Chorale super spreading event’ is one of over a dozen papers she has published and publically shared via CU Scholar, the university’s institutional repository. In only about a month it is closing in on 1,000 downloads and represents almost a quarter of CU Scholar downloads since it was posted."

SM: "What we found in that study is that wind instruments and singing and theater performances generate aerosol. And so we immediately have tried to investigate, well, how do we reduce the aerosol emissions from these activities? And we have tested things like masks and social distancing, and we've also looked at, um, ventilation and air cleaning and how you can layer all these approaches to make your teaching less, um, to make teaching music and playing music indoors safer."

MC: "Professor Miller’s engagement with open access publishing demonstrates what many researchers know to be true: that Open Access has an impact on the acceleration and advancement of scientific knowledge, and that Open Access is essential to getting that knowledge into the hands of the people who need it most.

“CU Scholar supports the research and teaching mission of CU Boulder by preserving and providing public access to the communities’ research activity."