Our work

Infrastructure, environment and infectious diseases

The core of our research is to understand the science and engineering between people, pathogens and pathways within infrastructure, and apply this knowledge to build a healthy environment. In here, infrastructure is broadly defined as the physical environments which are important to support the operation of a society. We have a cross section approach to study infrastructure in different contexts. 

HIRG will be an international hub for healthy infrastructure research and education. Our research will focus on the area of architecture and building engineering, environmental microbiology, technology and innovation, and people and behaviour.

Urban ecological engineering

Waste water treatment is one of the biggest challenges for urban sustainability. With climate change and increasing incidents of flooding in the UK and other parts of the world, waste water treatment facilities also play a key role on urban resilience to various environmental challenges. Following concepts of Biomimicry, that is taking inspiration from nature, its models, systems, processes and elements to solve design problems sustainably. Reducing the wasteful throughput of materials indeed, eliminating the very idea of waste, can be accomplished by redesigning industrial systems on biological lines that change the nature of industrial processes and materials, enabling the constant reuse of materials in continuous closed cycles, and often the elimination of toxicity

Research themes:
Theme 1. Linkages between infrastructure and infectious disease transmission
Theme 2. Instrumentation to recognise and treat pathogens and the means of evaluating change
Theme 3. Society - delivering solutions and future needs

Initiatives under these themes:
“Making links to the real world”: we follow people’s living patterns and real infection cases to links our research to the real world, for example we work with the HPA and UCL Partners, Europe’s largest academic health science Group (such as GOSH and UCLH) to monitor the environment and microbes in real life conditions.

“Research Playground” and “Research Factory” these initiatives are to bridge the future generations and innovative industrial ideas to the Group, respectively. In the “Research Playground”, we support students to come to visit us and even take part in our research. In the “Research Factory”, the idea is to build a one-stop-Group so industrial partners can develop and deliver their product to the society faster but still keep the rigorous scientific evidence based research quality .

A new approach for microbial sampling in schools

Pilot project in the field of air quality in schools and childcare settings

UCL Research Challenges - Hospital environments and infection transmission

Is this operating theatre more likely to cause infections?

Haiti - Building for health

Brazil - Housing policies, urban infrastructure and diseases: a case study of slums in Porto Alegre

Airborne transmission of new and emerging viral diseases

Lay perceptions, prejudice and the natural environment in the spread of animal-human and huma-animal infections

Football fans, vuvuzelas and aerosol transmission

Urban pathogens research Network -Upath

Indoor mould action

Bio-defence and bio-security