The New York Times reports:

When Linsey Marr’s son started attending day care 12 years ago, she noticed that he kept getting sick with the sniffles and other minor illnesses. But unlike most parents, Dr. Marr, an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech, tried to figure out why.

“When I’d pick him up, I’d find out that more than half the kids in the room were sick too,” said Dr. Marr. “I was really curious, and wondered, if it was spreading this fast, maybe it was going through the air.”

Dr. Marr was uniquely equipped to tackle the problem. She had graduated with an engineering science degree from Harvard University, where she developed an interest in air pollution during her daily runs breathing car exhaust on nearby Boston streets. She earned a doctorate in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and completed post-doctorate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Mario J. Molina, a Nobel laureate recognized for research into ozone damage caused by chlorofluorocarbon gases.

But it was during that first foray into day care germs that she discovered how little was known about airborne transmission of viruses.

“I was surprised to find out we don’t even know how much of the flu is spread through the air or through touching,” Dr. Marr said. “There was so little known about it that this personal fascination became an obsession.”

Now, Dr. Marr’s maternal and scientific curiosity and her multidisciplinary background have made her one of the world’s leading scientists on airborne viruses. Her research led to the publication of a groundbreaking study that found flu virus in microscopic droplets that were small enough to remain floating in the air for an hour or more. Another study suggested that the seasonality of flu was associated with humidity. Her work led to a National Institutes of Health New Innovator Award in 2013 and an appointment in January to a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine board.

But the coronavirus pandemic has put her in the spotlight. Public health officials in the United States and with the World Health Organization have called on Dr. Marr for her expertise, and scientists from all over the world have asked her to review their papers. Her lab has focused on testing new materials to solve shortages of personal protective equipment for medical workers. Working with her colleagues and graduate students, Dr. Marr’s lab found that a large stockpile of expired respirator masks were still effective but that 3-D printed masks unfortunately were not. [Continue reading…]