The Misztal Sniffer lab is leading novel air quality measurements outdoors, indoors and from individual sources. We are interested in quantified understanding of the factors affecting human health. The specific research questions include sources and sink apportionments, fate and exposure risk of volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
Our lab space is in the Center for Energy and Environmental Resources at the University of Texas at Austin.
Recent News
February 2nd, 2022
We had our first lab meeting of the semester.
March 26th, 2021
Daniel Blomdahl was awarded the NSF GRFP fellowship! He joins Elena Christopher-Allison as the Sniffer Lab’s NSF GRFP fellows!
Jan. 21st, 2021
Emma Hall gave a fascinating presentation for the EWRE Seminar Series!! She discussed her masters work — figuring out the link between relative humidity and microbial VOCs emitted from indoors.
Nov. 21th, 2020
We are happy to announce the newest member of the Sniffer lab: Sarah Deek, who graduated from UT-Austin in 2020 with a B.S. in Civil Engineering and is interested in chemical exposure effects on the human brain and in the research – policy interface towards improving indoor air quality regulations for her graduate research. Welcome Sarah!!
Nov. 5th, 2020
Many members of the Sniffer research group presented at the Indoor Air 2020 conference!
Prof. Misztal was a featured speaker in the “Chemical Emissions and Observations in the Indoor Environment” symposium. He discussed the future possibilities of understanding the human “volatilome”!
Daniel Blomdahl gave an oral presentation on exposure to disinfection byproducts when cleaning indoor spaces during a pandemic – and how facemasks might reduce VOC exposure.
Emma Hall presented a poster on her cool work examining how indoor microbial and nonmicrobial VOCs concentrations change when you change humidity in an indoor space!
Shahana Khurshid presented a poster on how VOC concentrations in a typical office space vary compared to CO2 concentration.
Oct. 22, 2020
Thank you to Prof. Rachel O’Brien (website here) from William and Mary for the great guest lecture in our Novel Air Quality Measurements course! Dr. O’Brien showed lots of cool data and information about measuring surface SVOC chemistry!
Oct. 12, 2020
Daniel Blomdahl gave a seminar talk on the Sniffer Lab’s recent work on VOC exposure from indoor disinfection events! You can watch the talk on Youtube here.
Sept 22, 2020
Prof. Misztal was interviewed by Nina Notman in this feature article from Chemistry World where he explains how the richness of volatile organic compounds emitted by humans has potential for understanding emotional states, health status and other psychological features simply from decoding the human “volatilome”.