Mark Hernandez News

Engineers at CU Boulder kicked off a new project this month that aims to investigate whether improving classroom air quality with air purifiers can help students miss fewer school days. The study comes at a time when millions of students across the country are chronically absent from school, a worsening...

The Washington Post is highlighting ways to keep air quality better indoors. The outlet interviewed Mark Hernandez, who advocates for installing HEPA air cleaners in homes, especially now, with smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketing the northeastern United States. “I look at them (air purifiers) as the seat belts for lungs,"...

Three years ago this week, Colorado recorded its first known cases of COVID-19. A week later, on March 12, CU Boulder announced its first positive case and quickly shifted to fully remote classes. Meanwhile, researchers at CU and universities across the country jumped into action to learn everything they could...

Recent research from CU Boulder may have finally revealed why humans tend to get sick from airborne viral diseases more often in drier environments. Published in December in PNAS-Nexus , the study found that airborne particles carrying a mammalian coronavirus closely related to the virus which causes COVID-19 remain infectious...

As one of the first interdisciplinary bioaerosol labs established in the U.S., the Environmental Engineering Microbiology and Disinfection Lab at CU Boulder is home to one of the biggest bioaerosol chambers in the country at an academic institution. At about 350 cubic feet (10 cubic meters), it provides a large...

Thanks to new CU Boulder research, scientists see the impact of flushing the toilet in a whole new light—and now, the world can as well. Using bright green lasers and camera equipment, a team of CU Boulder engineers ran an experiment to reveal how tiny water droplets, invisible to the...

The classrooms of Barnum Elementary School in Denver echo with the chatter of students and the instruction of teachers. The white, waist-high, curved machine in the corner is quiet as can be. The machine, which looks like a less-complicated R2D2, contains a NASA-designed HEPA filter and is part of a...

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought increased attention to indoor air quality and the effect that ventilation has on reducing disease transmission in indoor spaces. A recent infrastructure survey reported that of the nearly 100,000 operating public school buildings across the U.S., more than a third have an immediate need for...