Abstract:
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has exposed enormous challenges in containing the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Mitigation protocols such as lockdowns, social-distancing, isolation and quarantine have rightly helped track the human virus vectors via contact tracing. But not much is done to identify virus-laden bioaerosol specially in closed-door environments in hospitals and in pandemic hotspot regions. Bioaerosol surveillance will become an important part of the mitigation protocol in the post-pandemic period that is expected to last until 2024. This talk discusses the use of field-portable environmental aerosol mass spectrometers for in situ bio-aerosol sampling. Portable and miniature mass spectrometers are used to identify biochemical signatures on high-altitude environmental research aircrafts, orbiting spacecrafts, and extraterrestrial landers and rovers. They will be vital in the post-pandemic air monitoring in pandemic-sensitive crowded indoor environments like aircrafts. Likewise, pandemic-driven advances in aerosol mass spectrometry will also have spin-offs towards the research and development of life support systems for human spaceflight as well as life-detection astrobio-technological technologies.
Speaker: Dr. Chaitanya Giri, Space & Ocean Studies, Fellow. Gateway House: Indian Council for Global Relations. Affiliate Scientist at the Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Dr. Chaitanya Giri is the Gateway House Fellow of Space and Ocean Studies Programme. His present research focuses on the new-age technostrategy and geostrategy, the space and marine industrial complex, and the science of space exploration. Dr. Giri has worked as planetary and astromaterials scientist for nearly a decade. He was affiliated to the Earth-Life Science Institute at Tokyo Institute of Technology, the Geophysical Laboratory at Carnegie Institution for Science, and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as an ELSI Origins Network Fellow. He was earlier an International Max Planck Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany and the University of Nice in France. Dr. Giri was also a scientific crew member of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. He is a recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the 2014 Dieter Rampacher Prize of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of the Science, Germany and the 2016-2018 ELSI Origins Network Fellowship by the John Templeton Foundation, USA.
Date: May 29, 15:30-16:30
ELSI Host: Tony Z. Jia
Venue: Online