In the second episode of our “Environments for Health and Happiness” series, Dr. Joe Allen discusses how the buildings where we live and work can significantly affect our health. He reveals how often-overlooked factors like indoor air quality can impact mental and physical well-being. Dr. Allen shares insights from his work with Harvard's Healthy Buildings Program, emphasizing the importance of designing buildings that are both environmentally friendly and healthy for occupants. He encourages listeners to advocate for changes in building standards that promote better health outcomes. Tune in to discover how improving our indoor spaces can lead to healthier communities and what role you can play in this important effort.
Ayla Fudala: Hello and welcome to Frontiers in Health and Happiness, the official podcast of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. My name is Ayla Fudala, Center Communications Coordinator, and I'll be asking experts how to live a healthy, happy life.
This episode is the second in our Environments for Health and Happiness series. The goal of this series is to explore cutting edge research, practice informed insights, and innovative solutions that promote physical, social and mental health. These episodes will highlight the transformative power of thoughtfully integrated, natural and built environments to enhance quality of life and create happier, healthier, and more resilient urban communities.
Today, I'm interviewing Dr. Joe Allen, associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health's Department of Environmental Health. Dr. Allen is also director of Harvard's Healthy Buildings Program and co-author of Healthy Buildings How Indoor Spaces Can Make You Sick or Keep You Well. He serves on Harvard's Presidential Committee on Sustainability. He keynotes the White House's first ever indoor air quality Summit. And during the Covid 19 pandemic, he served as commissioner of the Lancet Covid 19 Commission. He has authored over 100 peer reviewed scientific papers and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review. All of that is extremely impressive. But while digging into Doctor Allen's background, I discovered something unexpected.
Dr. Allen, I read in a science article that you began your career as a detective in New York City and almost became an FBI agent. What caused you to totally change your course and enter the field of environmental health?
Dr. Joe Allen: Wow. All right. You've done your homework, and you did the deep research. So my not so secret secret is I used to be a private investigator in New York City. So the history is. My father was a homicide detective. And then when he left the police force, he started a business. And he was a private investigator. So as a kid, I was a private investigator. And then that was my job during college and after college for a couple of years, I knew I didn't want to be a private investigator forever. And so I started looking at grad schools. I knew I was a scientist at heart. Enrolled in a program at Penn. I focused on environmental science. And then I accidentally stumbled on a research assistant job at the Harvard School of Public Health. And I fell in love with public health.
Ayla Fudala: Why focus on air quality in particular?
Dr. Joe Allen: I focus on it because it's really important for our health, and it's underappreciated in the sense that if you ask most people about what constitutes healthy living, this is not what they think about rightly. They think about exercise and eating healthy. And that's all important and good. But very few people think about the indoor environment. And it's important for this really simple fact. We spend 90% of our time indoors. We're an indoor species. Like it or not, this is where most of us are spending most of our time. The way we operate and design our buildings is really having a big impact on our health, our kids health, and our mental well-being, and it's just largely ignored. So I'm drawn to it because I think it's really important and it brings in some of this kind of environmental health, maybe a little bit of the engineering and problem solving. Right. I've seen a lot of buildings where people get sick, and it's all very solvable to me, and I think it's been understudied and under-appreciated in terms of its impact on human health.
Ayla Fudala: The focus of our environments for Health and Happiness podcast series is to discuss how both the natural and built environment affect our mental, physical and social health. Could you talk about how this intersects with your work on indoor air quality and buildings?
Dr. Joe Allen: Yeah, I mean, we know the way the built environment, the natural environment impacts our health because we've studied this. That's green space, that's outdoor air pollution. That's the social structures that keep us healthy or contribute to sickness. And buildings operate just as that next layer, just like we see inequalities and disparities in the environment, in social structures, we see the same things happening within buildings. And we have lots of examples where some of these environmental factors are causing real harm and injury and illness in people, and these risks are not evenly distributed. And the thing that really frustrates me is that it's a totally tractable problem. Like we know how to design a healthy building doesn't cost extra and yet we don't do it. It turns out these structures our schools, our homes, our offices, our hospitals can make us sick or keep us well.
Ayla Fudala: Where is the evidence present in this topic and where is it lacking?
Dr. Joe Allen: I think there's really strong evidence that the indoor environment impacts us on many dimensions of health. So for example, really specifically, it's really clear that buildings influence respiratory pathogen transmission. That's influenza, Covid, RSV. In fact, nearly all the transmission for respiratory pathogens happens indoors. So there's one. We also know that the materials we use in our buildings, on our carpets, our couches, our chairs, our walls oftentimes are built with toxic chemicals. These toxic chemicals interfere with our immune system to interfere with our reproductive health. They interfere with the rest of our hormone system in our body. There's a clear link and robust link between indoor air quality and cognitive function. This is really clear. I think where there's gaps or need for more information is on some of these topics around buildings and let's call it overall wellbeing or mental health and, and even some of the work that's been labeled maybe like biophilic design in my field. So nature inspired design. And what are these attributes of buildings around the aesthetic of it? The look, the feel, the shapes, the patterns. How does that contribute to joy, happiness, good mental health? I think it's one of these things that's obvious and intuitive, but maybe just hasn't been empirically quantified as well, at least in my field. So that feels like a gap and a rich gap.
Ayla Fudala: Okay, so there's lots of evidence for the impact of building design on physical health, but not very much on mental or social health.
Dr. Joe Allen: Well, I think there's more on social health, because if you think about social determinants and the quality of our housing, for example, there's a lot of good studies on things like pest infiltration or gross failings in terms of lead exposure or mold and moisture, particularly if you think about affordable housing or public housing. I think that that dimension of these social structures and how buildings contribute to poor health, I think that's pretty clear. I think on the mental health side, I think there are links between some of these, this cognitive function work, and I think some of the strongest links, at least from the environmental perspective, is what we know about outdoor air pollution and its links with, let's say, overall brain health. And that's where we know there are links between the outdoor environment and various aspects of it, and things like anxiety, depression, feeling well or not. And some of that we can make a link to the indoor environment because outdoor pollution, which is associated with these mental health indicators that outdoor air pollution penetrates inside. So it turns out you breathe a lot, if not most, of the outdoor air pollution you breathe happens inside. And I think a lot of people find that surprising. So it's not a jump to say, hey, all this literature is out there showing links between outdoor air pollution, let's say, and mental health or brain health. Well, if you're breathing all of that or most of it indoors, the way the building is designed and how much of that outdoor air pollution penetrates inside is linked.
Ayla Fudala: You mentioned the impact of building design and air quality on cognitive functioning. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Dr. Joe Allen: Yeah, we've done many studies and other groups have to looking at really minor and subtle changes to things like ventilation or how much outdoor air is coming in, or the level of VOCs, which are volatile organic compounds. And we found in studies that when you improve the air quality, so better ventilation, lower particle levels, lower VOC levels, people perform better on tests of cognitive function and cognitive domains like information seeking, information usage, a strategic decision making, crisis response. Working from home, we see the same effect. We've done this with college students and master's students, including at our school, and we show better performance on these cognitive tests. There are other people have done these same kind of tests on kids in school, younger kids, and they find they perform better on reading tests and math tests.
Ayla Fudala: And how would you link health equity into that? You briefly mention social determinants of health earlier. If different buildings have different levels of air filtration, how would that affect people and how does that relate to health equity?
Dr. Joe Allen: Well, in studies that have looked at ventilation and disparities, we see that the lowest ventilation rates are in schools with predominantly black or Hispanic populations and or schools with predominantly or majority of kids on free and reduced lunch. So just like we see these disparities and inequalities in every aspect of health, as we look at these social determinants, we see the same thing when it comes to something like ventilation rates. It's one of the reasons why myself and my team are laser focused on driving all of this research into new policy, because the only way that we're going to change the current paradigm, such that it benefits everyone, everywhere, is to change the way we design and operate our buildings and codify that. Right. It has to come into code, such as not a choice of who can afford to have a healthy building or good air quality. It's no, no, no. This is the way it has to be done for everyone, everywhere.
Ayla Fudala: So we need it to be legally required that buildings be healthy and safe for everyone. If we want to see these changes made.
Dr. Joe Allen: Yeah, it sounds wild when you just said it that, like, it's not already the case that we design buildings to be healthy for everyone. You know, when you hear it, it's stark because it should be eye opening to people to hear this and think, wait, we don't design our buildings to be healthy in the first place. Every building should just be healthy. The products we use in our building should be healthy and free of toxic chemicals. It should not be the case that we have healthy buildings and not healthy buildings, where healthy buildings represent some kind of premium for those who can afford it, right? That can't be the goal, and it's one of the reasons you know both that at all levels federal level. International. State. City. Township by township, school by school. We're trying to put this into the code. And in fact, Harvard just released a new healthy building standards here. So of course we want to do well at Harvard. But the idea is that we shared that with the world and say, here's what we think these new healthy building targets and standards should be.
Ayla Fudala: I'd like to talk about how builders can design healthier spaces. And I'd like to start off by asking what distinguishes a sick building from a healthy building?
Dr. Joe Allen: Health is not just the absence of disease, but it's also about health promotion and thriving. The current approach has been just to design these buildings to these bare minimum standards, where either people are actually getting sick and I mean everything from not feeling right to headaches to cancer clusters and buildings to people dying because the building and the air quality in the space. So it's the whole gamut.
Ayla Fudala: How is that possible? Air quality in a building can be so bad I can kill you.
Dr. Joe Allen: Absolutely. And we see this in particularly if you think about workers and the air quality in factories. We've seen chemical releases where people have been sick. You think about in a hospital with Legionnaire's disease, which is a bacteria that that grows and thrives in water, but gets into our bodies when it's aerosolized, gets into the air, and people inhale it. That can kill. I've worked on outbreaks where people have died. I've seen all of this. I've investigated cancer clusters in buildings. All. I've investigated other clusters of Bell's palsy related to workers breathing contaminated air. So I get calls every week from someone, somewhere.
A school just called recently. Parents were concerned. Their kids, their kindergartners, are in a school that was built over a Superfund site, and they're worried about vapor intrusion. And some of the tests showed that, yeah, there are toxic chemicals coming into this building where the where the kids are going to school and the parents are worried, and they call me on a Friday and they say, well, what do we do? School’s Monday. Should we send our kids back? So this happens all the time in buildings. I'm not sure people are aware of the extent of how many people are getting sick in buildings. And then I think what's happening everywhere, most buildings, is that people are not able to perform their best because the building's holding them back and you're tired, you're sleeping, don't feel right. I got a little bit of a headache. The building can contribute to that. That's lighting. That's air quality. It's all of these factors, right? It's almost every building at this point hasn't been designed for a real health based target. And so it's not surprising then that we see these issues. It's asthma attacks related to mold. It's lead and it's PCBs. It's asbestos in buildings. Formaldehyde. So just like this brew in our buildings. And the really frustrating thing again is that we know what to do. We know what's been going wrong. And so we know how to do it right. It doesn't cost extra to make a building healthy in the first place.
Ayla Fudala: That was pretty much my next question. How can a structure be designed to encourage positive mental, social, and physical health? And have you conducted any interventions on this topic?
Dr. Joe Allen: This is where it'd be a nice collaboration with your center, because some of the work we've done has been related to really around biophilic design or nature-inspired design, and we see people perform better on these tests of cognitive function. They have lower stress levels when we put them in a room. We've done these studies in virtual reality, believe it or not, and we've put them in a room either like a, you know, an ugly classic office box. Or then in the virtual world, we change, we swap things out, we add a plant, we change the carpet, we open up one wall to be a window. And sure enough, after we stress people, we put them in these spaces that are designed with these, you know, access to light, we see a quicker stress recovery. And so, you know, there's a handful of these kind of studies out there that show this. But also it's, I think, really obvious and common sense, right, that we all kind of know the spaces where we feel good and don't feel good. But I do think that it's still an area that is a gap in the research in terms of the, let's say, the depth or even the breadth of studies that have actually tried to look at this and quantify it.
Ayla Fudala: How is climate change affecting our buildings and in turn, our mental, physical and social health?
Dr. Joe Allen: Climate change is impacting our buildings, but buildings are also influencing climate change, so they consume 40% of global energy. They're a major contributor to the climate crisis. But when designed right, they can be net zero. So they can be really climate friendly. Buildings are also critical in terms of climate adaptation. And this is where it gets into what's relationship between buildings, climate and mental health. Well, if you think about some of the climate issues we're facing, extreme heat, wildfire smoke. Well, the way again, the building is designed determines whether or not it's acting as a as a place of refuge or not. Wildfire smoke will penetrate inside. But if you design your building right, the building can essentially act as a wall and limit how much of that outdoor air pollution comes in. So all of the negative effects we know mental health and physical health effects, we know from climate change. The building is playing a role in kind of mitigating that. These are either places where you're safe, secure and like physically safe and secure and also physiologically safe or they're not.
Ayla Fudala: How can buildings be constructed to be both climate friendly and beneficial for the health of their occupants? And can you give any examples?
Dr. Joe Allen: Yeah, it's been a false choice that we can have a green building or a healthy building. I think it's totally unacceptable to have a energy efficient building where people get sick inside. And I think it's equally unacceptable to have a healthy building where we're ignoring our responsibilities to people beyond the four walls through environmental impacts. There are many strategies you can use that both promote good indoor health and reduce the burden on the environment, for example. Let's take that topic of air quality and ventilation rate. So I want to bring in more air. So how do I do it better. There's an energy penalty to that. But we can get a lot smarter about where and when we ventilate. We can use things like demand control ventilation, which means you bring in air when and where it's needed. When some people are in a room, we're not just pumping expensively conditioned air all throughout a building. If you have a clean grid, you're minimizing your environmental penalty associated with heating and cooling.
So I think these are some of the basic strategies that we're doing some of that right here at Harvard. We have buildings that are that are both energy efficient and healthy. A classic one is in New York City. I've worked with and I advised JPMorgan on their new headquarters. It's a beautiful new building right in Midtown Manhattan, but it's the first all electric tower. It's sourced with renewable energy. Also has double the minimum ventilation rate. Has the highest filtration. Real time air quality monitoring, demand control, ventilation, healthy materials. So you're showing that, you know it's very possible to do this. I recognize this is, you know, in New York at a great firm, but I think some of these proof of concepts are really important for the market, because when you first present it, people say it can't be done. The architects, designers that can't be done. And now that there are examples out there, it starts to to knock down the argument that it's an either or proposition. Well, there's there's ways to do it. It can be done. And we need these kind of market first movers in the market to show it can be done. Other people pay attention. I already know of new buildings that are going up that have paid attention to that building and are starting to change practice. But what about the question of funding?
Ayla Fudala: The example you gave is a very well funded corporation. What about places that have less funding like public schools? How can they be both climate friendly and healthy for their occupants?
Dr. Joe Allen: Yeah. So a great question. I think these are examples of, you know, that's a first mover showing you can do this in a big city in a high rise. But there are a lot of examples of schools doing this. And you know, when I was part of the Lancet Covid 19 Commission, we released a report called the First four Healthy Building Strategies Every Building Should Pursue. And the first one is what is called commissioning. Or I think a better way to phrase is giving your building a tune up, just like you do for your car. So every building can do this. And it actually is cost neutral, because when you tune up your building, you're improving its performance. That helps improve indoor air quality, and then you're actually saving energy. So the return on investment through the energy payback can be a couple of years. In other words, it's a strategy that saves energy, improves indoor air quality and actually saves money. There's some of these other strategies to like better filtration. Well, that's like a couple dollars to upgrade from these typical. Filters that barely do anything but protect the equipment to. Filters that actually protect. You know, our lungs and the lungs of the building were really intentional to not give recommendations that are, you know, some wild new technology that no one can do or no one can afford. I think some why I like to work with some of these first mover companies is there's inertia in the market. It's like, oh, it's the way it's always been done. And I think what I've seen firsthand in my career is that the way it's always been done can make people sick in buildings, and it happens a lot.
Ayla Fudala: Thank you. That sounds like a win win then. Next, I'd like to turn to your own programs and initiatives, starting with the Harvard Healthy Buildings program, which you direct. What is this program and what does it aim to achieve? And also, what are your proudest accomplishments as director of the program?
Dr. Joe Allen: Wow. Great question. So our goal is the health of all people and all buildings everywhere, every day. That's what we shoot for. I got a question on the very first day from one of the deans when I was hired here and said, how will your research impact the world that's written on my lab wall? We are mission driven, and the mission is how do we improve the health of people in all these buildings?
Ayla Fudala: That's not a small goal.
Dr. Joe Allen: No, but I think we have a responsibility as as anyone in public health would, to think big. We know that if we can change practice around buildings, we can really influence the lives of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people globally. So what is it? It's a team of really great researchers and scientists and students. It's a real collaborative environment where we're aligned on the mission. We want to have a big impact. We tackle, I think, hard questions, and we're committed to being sure we can translate the research to the public. Probably like most professors, I think the thing I'm most proud about is, is what our students, former students, are now doing out in the world and just kind of having a front row seat of that.
Ayla Fudala: That's incredible. Earlier today, you participated in a meeting of the Harvard Presidential Committee on Sustainability, where you serve as co-chair. Are you at liberty to share what was discussed and more generally? Can you tell me what initiatives are being undertaken to promote healthy environments for the Harvard community?
Dr. Joe Allen: Yeah, Harvard University has got a terrific office for sustainability and up and down commitment across leadership and across the schools to really hit our our ambitious climate goals. We've had a couple big wins that were just announced. The university related to some clean power purchasing that's going to offset the equivalent of a couple, I think, over 100,000 homes. Electricity, the equivalent of what 100,000 homes would use. We've had massive wins in terms of our healthy materials work that we announced.
We have new healthy building standards, and this started as a project I worked on with Harvard's Chief Sustainability officer, Heather Hendrickson, ten years ago or so. We pitched this idea with just a little pilot project, and now there's 60 projects on campus that have been designed and with healthy materials that's eliminating things like Forever Chemicals. And we're working with other major multinationals who are doing this to. And the collective impact, I think has a changed market, and towards anybody going to buy some of these products now have these healthier alternatives that don't have toxic chemicals. That was a nice big win. So so the university is really now planning out what our 2026 fossil free neutral goal, how are we going to hit that and our 2050 fossil fuel free goal. And so there are big decisions made. You know, what do you do with these big power plants or how do you decarbonize our buildings.
And what I most like about this group is the commitment to sharing this knowledge so that it benefits people beyond Harvard. I don't think the goal here at Harvard is, hey, we want to have a healthier buildings and meet our climate goals, and we're done. And we, you know, we clap our hands and say, we did it. It's very much how do we tackle some of these really hard problems and then share that or work with others to say, how do you then scale this so other organizations can benefit from that work? So we haven't shied away and we don't shy away here at Harvard from these really difficult problems on how to get to challenges and how to get to fossil fuel free. But we're making great progress. So I'm optimistic.
Ayla Fudala: Wow. That's incredible. I'm so happy to hear that Harvard's working on all these projects. Can you discuss your book, Healthy Buildings How Indoor Spaces Can Make You Sick or Keep You Well, which you co-authored with John Machamer from the Harvard Business School? What are the major takeaways you want to convey to readers?
Dr. Joe Allen: John and I joined forces with different backgrounds, so I came at this from a public health environmental health background. John comes at this from a climate adaptation and real estate finance background, and we kind of joined forces and said, can we make a convincing argument for healthy buildings? And I think if you read the book, we make the point that buildings can really influence our health, and then we make the economic argument that if you do it right, if a business does this right, there are gains in terms of productivity, performance, economic performance of the firm. There's countrywide economic benefits. And I think what it does is it expands or widens the value proposition. So my interest is I want to have healthy buildings because I care about healthy people in spaces. That's great. The economic argument just brings in a Another audience that gives them another reason to act on the buildings. Oh, if I. If I improve air quality, my building, my people are sick less often and they perform better and I can monetize that. Okay, now we can just make the case that healthy buildings are just good business. We also lay out some principles around what matters in a building and bring in some of the science, I hope, in an accessible way. And we lay out a vision for where we see the field going in terms of this kind of healthy and green building movement. And John and I teach, you know, we, we call home and away lectures. So I teach public health to his business school students and his class. And he comes over to school, public health and teaches in my class on healthy buildings and puts an economic lens because I think it's really important for our students in public health. You know, you want to impact the world, you want to change it. It's naive not to know where the levers are in terms of power and also the money drivers. So if you want to influence the building market, who are the people making decisions from investors to owners to occupiers to the suppliers to designers, architects. And you think about this complex matrix of people and then where are the levers for influence?
Ayla Fudala: Knowledge can only do so much if it isn't translated to the public and put into practice, and it seems like you are extremely aware of that. As an academic, you seem very, very focused on the practical applications of your work. Can you discuss a little bit about your strategies for translating your research to the public and into practical applications? I think a lot of scholars want to see their work out in the world more, but there's a study that shows it typically takes 17 years in between the research coming out and it actually being implemented. So do you have any advice for scholars wanting to get their work out into the world?
Dr. Joe Allen: Well, I don't know if I have any advice because I think it's different for every person, but I agree. It's not satisfying to me to do the research if it's not going to make an impact. I think it's part of our team's core belief that, you know, you're in public health. You need a public voice. And and we do work really hard on getting this message out. And I don't think there's one particular strategy. I think it's all in everything. I'm on social media. I'm posting all the time about new studies. I write for popular newspapers, The Times, Washington Post, but I also write for the business community and Harvard Business Review, because I know that if you convince a CEO on a Friday because they read something in HBR, this is a good idea Monday morning, it changes practice, and that could influence the health of a couple hundred thousand workers. So that feels really powerful to me. I talk with reporters all the time sometimes just help them think through stories or work through the science. We're doing seminars. I answer every call from any school that's ever called me. So we're just committed to getting our message out there. We work a lot on our own website and our own materials, our own blog posts.
Ayla Fudala: Well, speaking of translating research to the public, I'm sure our audience would like to know what actions can individuals take to ensure their own health and well-being in regards to indoor air quality?
Dr. Joe Allen: There's some simple things you can do in the home, particularly around things like when you're cooking. You should have that exhaust ventilation on the back of the stove. Hopefully you have that if not propped open the windows just a little bit because you really build up some high particle levels when you're cooking. Portable air cleaners are really quite effective if you're in an area that has bad outdoor air pollution or are impacted by wildfire smoke, or in the winter season when you're worried about flu transmission and Covid, we've had some guidance on our website. If you just Google Harvard Healthy Buildings, you should find our website. We have a report on 36 expert tips for a Healthier Home that people can poke around and see. All our ideas for tips for the bathroom, in the bedroom, in the kitchen and everywhere else. So hopefully that that helps a little bit.
Ayla Fudala: While individual action is always important, there's only so much a single person can do. What do you think the government should be doing to promote healthy environments for the general public?
Dr. Joe Allen: There's really been like a paradigm shift where I don't think the federal government, or even local or city governments were really talking about this issue until Covid hit. But now CDC and others are actually starting to talk about the importance of ventilation and air quality. So I think some of the most effective things CDC or the government can do is use the bully pulpit to announce to the world, we think this is important and put out resources and guidance. There's guidance out there already on what a healthy building should be, and the government's role should be to make that law. Put it into building codes. Why are we designing schools to standards that we know are subpar? I can't even believe this is acceptable in this day and age. We know how to design buildings that make people healthy, and we still haven't changed the code, the standards, and it's just been slow moving. So this has to be built into the code or it's not going to reach everyone. It's just going to widen disparities in terms of building quality.
Ayla Fudala: It's interesting when I spoke to the scholars studying loneliness, a lot of them had been studying it long before the pandemic. It didn't have any attention on their research, but when the pandemic hit, it shone a light on the issue of loneliness. And it seems like a similar thing was the case with indoor air quality. Did Covid shine a light on your research as well?
Dr. Joe Allen: Yeah, for sure. There's an awareness shift that's happened where major news outlets are writing about it. The public is thinking about it. We're having this conversation because people, I think, realize just how important buildings were during the pandemic. So yeah, there was a big awareness shift that happened. It took a lot of work to get people to pay attention. But now I think these are lessons that won't be forgotten.
Ayla Fudala: We've been speaking a lot about physical health. And you mentioned earlier that there is not a ton of evidence on indoor air quality linked to mental health and social health in terms of loneliness and social isolation. So these are evidence gaps.
Dr. Joe Allen: Correct. There's lots of evidence on social structures and how that influences poor building design, how that translates into bad indoor air quality, what that does to people's health and wellbeing, and the disparities we see in society related to these structural issues. Um, and I think there are some of these links between indoor air quality and mental health or brain health. We've kind of shown all the ways buildings can make us sick, but what are the ways the buildings can be leveraged as a tool for positive mental health and wellbeing? And that's going to be in the design of the building. And so what are these spaces that are actually promote good mental health? Well, I've seen some studies looking at industrial properties where there are places that are that are not designed with any of these biophilic design attributes or poor air quality concrete structures, no lighting, no joy, no colour in the space. And people report higher levels of dissatisfaction with the space.
So what is it? The air quality is the thermal comfort. Is it the the lack of lighting lack like lack of access to natural daylight? It's all of that contributing. And so but it's wrapped up in some of these measures of just, you know, overall satisfaction. Those, those kind of studies are really quite common in terms of like a survey based study that says, how do you like your space? And people report on a satisfaction scale. But I think we can do a lot better than that and try to parse out what's driving what and what aspects of mental health, rather than just, you know, a Likert scale of I feel okay in this space or not.
Ayla Fudala: This is my penultimate question. What will your next project focus on? What's the next big thing in store for Dr. Joe Allen?
Dr. Joe Allen: We have a lot of really exciting work happening on the team right now. We're working on something really kind of cool. We built a simulated population of over 300 million people in the US, and we've also built a tool to create residential building archetypes so we can simulate 20,000 different homes and we can put those people in the homes. And so that's new and exciting, because then we can turn a policy lever on this and, and start to ask questions around design decisions around buildings. What if we mandated higher ventilation rates? What would be the benefit to asthma, cognitive function, infectious disease transmission reductions. What would the cost? What would the energy cost be? We can look at factors like energy use and buildings related to outdoor air pollution and extreme heat and wildfire smoke. So we're really excited about it. And we have really talented team building this model and working on it. And we actually think it can be leveraged for a whole bunch of other questions that we're actually not even thinking about at the moment. So if anybody out there hears this and wants to collaborate, we think it's a great tool.
Ayla Fudala: Wow. That's incredible. It's like a really, really high tech version of The Sims.
Dr. Joe Allen: That’s exactly what it is.
Ayla Fudala: Okay. My final question is, do you have any last words for our audience before you go?
Dr. Joe Allen: I hope it convinced some people that we think about indoor air. So that's number one. And the other is because we spend so much time indoors and everybody globally is spending time inside structures. If we get it right, we have the power to improve the condition. Hundreds of millions of people around the world every day. That's pretty powerful. But it starts with the recognition that, yeah, buildings are important to our health. The current status and approach to them has not had public health as the North Star. And if we flip that and start to design our buildings with a health goal in mind, we can have this massive impact on people's health globally. In fact, without exaggeration, buildings could be one of the most powerful public health tools we have this century.
Ayla Fudala: As we conclude this episode, let's remember that advocacy for healthier buildings is not just for scientists and policymakers. It involves all of us, whether it's voicing our concerns about the air quality in our own workplaces and schools, or supporting policy changes at the local or national level. Every action counts. Let's take these insights from Doctor Allan and become proactive in shaping environments that promote health and happiness for everyone.
In the third episode of our Environments for Health and Happiness series, we’ll shift our focus from individual buildings to the broader scale of entire cities. Learning how the built environment can affect our mental, social and physical health, and what can be done to ensure that those impacts are positive. We'll be learning from Dr. Jo-Ivey Boufford, a renowned leader in urban public health, as well as a member of our center's scientific advisory board. With a career spanning decades, Dr. Boufford has held many important roles, including serving as the president of the New York Academy of Medicine and Dean of New York University's Graduate School of Public Service. Tune in next time to learn all about the critical role cities play in promoting our health and happiness.
This has been another episode of Frontiers in Health and Happiness, the official podcast of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. To learn more about upcoming events, visit our website. Sign up for our mailing list and follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. New episodes will air every two weeks. Episodes can be found on the Lee Seung Center for Health and Happiness website and YouTube channel, as well as on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else podcasts are found. Thank you for listening.