Linsey Marr

@linseymarr.bsky.social

Engineering professor at Virginia Tech with expertise in air pollution, airborne microbes, nanotechnology. Avid recreational athlete.

@linseymarr.bsky.social

It's awful that six people have died from the Legionnaires' disease outbreak in NYC. It spreads by inhaling Legionella bacteria, which are probably being aerosolized from a cooling tower.

www.nytimes.com/2026/07/27/n...

My postdoc Thuong Cao is studying their survival in droplets.

nytimes.comLegionnaires’ Disease Has Made a Home in New York City. Here’s How. (Gift Article)New York has endured significant outbreaks in recent years. Some experts say officials should focus more on risks in plumbing systems, even shower heads.
@linseymarr.bsky.social

The general patterns are true for any kind of vehicle, not just EVs.

Dustin Poppendieck @poppendieck.bsky.social

The hotter your car cabin is the higher the concentration of chemicals in the cabin air. (Concentrations roughly double for each 10C increase in temp).... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.comEstimation of VOC emissions from an electric vehicle interior as a function of cabin air temperature using a selected ion tube flow mass spectrometer (SIFT-MS) measurementVOC (Volatile Organic Compound) emissions from vehicle interior materials pose a risk to public health. It is important to be able to predict VOC emis…
@linseymarr.bsky.social

Our latest paper shows that most aerosol sampling methods may underestimate infectious virus in air. We observed 100x more infectious flu virus and SARS-CoV-2 if it deposited directly on cells (more realistic) rather than in liquid first and then transferred to cells. pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

pubs.acs.orgLoss of Infectivity of Influenza Virus and SARS-CoV-2 during Aerosol SamplingOur understanding of transmission of influenza virus and other respiratory viruses is limited by the difficulty of detecting infectious viruses in aerosol particles. Most aerosol sampling methods are believed to contribute to virus inactivation, but the magnitude of this sampling artifact is unknown. To investigate this question, we aerosolized influenza A virus (IAV) and SARS-CoV-2 suspended in human saliva into a small chamber (3.7 L). Aerosols settled for 10 min onto either cells or a thin layer of liquid medium that was immediately transferred to cells for plaque assay. Aerosols that deposited directly onto cells led to the formation of 100× more plaque forming units (PFU) compared to aerosols that deposited first into liquid medium. Further experiments ruled out uneven aerosol distribution in the chamber or inefficient virus recovery as causes of this discrepancy. These findings indicate that aerosolized IAV and SARS-CoV-2 lost infectivity by approximately 2 log10 PFU within ∼10 min unless they attached to cells quickly. As natural infection via inhalation occurs by direct deposition of the virus onto cells, we hypothesize that sampling directly onto cells more accurately reflects the potential for exposure to lead to infection.