Janetos Climate Action Prize winners Primah Muwanga (left) and Celine Chen (center) with faculty advisor Thomas Little. Their team developed and refined air quality sensors, shrinking them from an initial design (held by Muwanga) to a doorbell-sized version (held by Chen).

Campus Climate Lab

BU Students Win Janetos Climate Action Prize for Uncovering Air Quality Gaps Between Old and New Campus Buildings

Using student-designed, low-cost sensors, the team hopes to help improve classroom air quality

The buildings that make up Boston University’s campuses are a mix of old architecture and brand-new construction. This means that the air quality in these buildings can vary significantly. Some structures, like the more recently built Boston University Photonics Center, have exceptional air quality—while others have room for improvement. 

For the last two years, a team of Boston University students has been designing and testing indoor air quality monitors in order to better understand—and ultimately improve—ventilation in different buildings across the Charles River Campus. Healthier air has been shown to boost academic performance, so raising standards across campus could potentially help students with concentration and test results.  

Now, in recognition of their work, they’ve won the 2025 Janetos Climate Action Prize, an annual award given to a student project that received funding from BU’s Campus Climate Lab (CCL). It’s awarded to the team whose work can most significantly advance BU’s Climate Action Plan.   

Because air quality is so important—but often not visible to the naked eye—it’s important to “create tools such as ours to help assess and detect these deficiencies,” said Celine Chen (ENG’25), during the group’s presentation. “We hope to share our results with the overall BU community, and continue to develop, refine, and use the tools that we’ve created,” she said.

The student researchers showcased their work at the annual Campus Climate Lab spring symposium. At the event, 10 CCL project teams shared overviews of their research with short lectures and poster presentations. The Janetos Prize was announced at the conclusion of the symposium. The winning team was represented by Chen and Primah Muwanga (CGS’24, CDS’27). Ellen Zheng (ENG’27) was studying abroad at the time of the symposium, but worked on the project remotely. 

With funding from CCL, Chen, Muwanga, and Zheng—along with former students Marybel Boujaoude (ENG’24) and Yangyang Zhang (ENG’24)—designed and built 29 air quality sensors, which they used to gather approximately 30 million readings from classrooms this spring. The students deployed 21 of the sensors in two Charles River Campus buildings: an older building that houses the Engineering Product Innovation Center, and a relatively new one, the Photonics Center.

In their presentation, Chen and Muwanga detailed how their device showed the differences in air quality between the two. “Our research results have shown that there’s inequitable access to clean indoor air when comparing an older building to a newer one,” Chen said after the event. “We’ve seen that there’s poor ventilation and high CO2 values in these older buildings, while the modern ones work perfectly fine.”

Although none of the levels were considered unsafe, a high amount of CO2 in a building can be problematic. “It can cause headaches and lack of attention, and we wouldn’t want that in a student environment such as this,” Muwanga said.

Their findings prompted the team to talk with BU Operations, which manages much of the University’s infrastructure, to discuss ways to improve localized air filtration for particulates, increase airflow to classrooms where needed, and consider occupancy-based controls to save energy. 

“Is indoor air at BU healthy and equitable? With continuous auditing, we can identify when air quality is below levels it should be at,” Muwanga said. As the only nonengineer on the team, Muwanga—who is studying computing and data science—said the project showed her different ways that data could be used, especially for sustainability. She and Chen said that they would like to continue working on similar projects in the future.

“I did engineering because I was really passionate about innovation and how something so small could make such an impact,” Chen said. “I think this project was perfect for that. I feel like it showed me that BU cares about sustainability and the impact of students. I really hope to find some way to do this in my career, as well.”

“We’re surprised that we won this award,” said Thomas Little, a BU College of Engineering professor of electrical and computer engineering and the faculty advisor to the winning team. “It’s exciting, and it suggests that we’ve achieved some impact that’s definitely worth continuing with.”

The other student teams studied ways to improve the handling of chemicals in labs, reduce BU’s carbon output from green spaces, decarbonize major buildings, monitor urban air pollution, improve environmental justice, update waste management in art studios, utilize natural processes to solve environmental issues, and reduce microplastics from BU laundry rooms. A team also researched algae bioreactors, a potential way to produce carbon-negative, cost-effective energy.

CCL is led by the Institute for Global Sustainability, in collaboration with BU Sustainability and the Office of Research. Since its launch in 2020, CCL has awarded $410,000 to 49 projects involving more than 230 students, faculty, and staff. Last year’s Janetos Prize went to a student group that developed air sensors to measure outdoor air pollution and map the quality of air in different neighborhoods in Boston.

Little and the indoor CO2 monitoring team hope to keep scaling up the sensor project, with an eventual goal of tracking air quality in every building on BU’s campuses.

“As engineers, we are drawn to design projects, and innovating and developing technology that can enable other things,” Little said. “And I think that we’ve accomplished that.”