The upcoming CASE Open Lecture will be given by Professor Cath Noakes OBE with her talk titled, ‘Engineering the environment to control infection’ on Tuesday 2 February at 18.00. All open lectures this academic year will be held on Microsoft Teams. Please use this link to join the event.
Professor Noakes writes, “The challenge posed by COVID-19 has shone a spotlight on the relationships between buildings and the transmission of infection. To understand the mechanisms of transmission and implement effective mitigation strategies we have had to draw on experiences for other respiratory viruses together with the growing evidence based on the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
This lecture considers the complex interactions that determine the dispersion, transport and survival of microorganisms in aerosols and droplets, and what this means for respiratory disease transmission including the SARS-CoV-2 virus. I will discuss some of the engineering and modelling approaches that can be used to understand mechanisms for transmission and consider how we can design effective mitigation strategies, including the interactions between people and the environment, the role of ventilation and the potential application for air cleaning technologies.
The talk considers how research findings may be used to support practice, and where there are knowledge gaps in understanding the importance of the built environment to the transmission of disease.”
Professor Cath Noakes OBE is a chartered mechanical engineer, with a background in fluid dynamics. Her teaching and research expertise is in building physics and environmental engineering and she leads research into ventilation, indoor air quality and infection control in the built environment.
Her internationally recognised research group carry out experimental and modelling based studies, to explore the transport of airborne pathogens, the influence of indoor airflows and effectiveness of engineering approaches to controlling airborne disease transmission.
Cath is currently Deputy Director of Leeds Institute for Fluid Dynamics and Co-Director for the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Fluid Dynamics. Since April 2020 she has been involved in the UK COVID-19 response, leading the SAGE EMG sub-group focusing on the science underpinning environmental transmission of COVID-19.
All welcome!