Patricia Fabian walks across the roof of Josiah Quincy Elementary School in Chinatown on July 15, 2026. A sepia-toned haze blankets the sky as she surveys the building for indicators that the severe pollution event might impact the school’s indoor air quality. Photo: Megan Jones

Environmental Health

Researchers Test Real-World Solutions to Counter Effects of Wildfire Smoke in Schools

Building on four years of collaborative research with Boston Public Schools, researchers at the School of Public Health are now testing whether existing interventions protect students and staff from severe outdoor air pollution, with teachers as key new partners.

This summer, as smoke from wildfires raging across Canada has drifted into Boston, at times casting a sepia-toned haze over the city, a team of researchers led by Patricia Fabian, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health at the School of Public Health, is conducting experiments in Boston Public Schools (BPS) to answer an urgent, two-fold question: how vulnerable are classrooms to outdoor air pollution, and what can make them more resilient?

For four years, Fabian and her team at the Sustainable Schools group have been analyzing the air in BPS classrooms, revealing surprising variability and highlighting older buildings without modern air filtration systems as most vulnerable to air pollution. With the increasing threat of intensifying wildfires due to climate change, the team has now progressed to testing how well solutions already in place work.

“We know that outdoor air pollution can infiltrate indoors, and how much that happens depends on a lot of different factors [such as] building characteristics—how renovated they are, how old they are, whether people left the windows open—all of these things affect how much the outdoor air gets inside,” says Beverly Ge, a PhD candidate in environmental health and a member of the research team. “So [we’re] trying to answer the question: how vulnerable are BPS schools to these outdoor air pollution events? If we can answer that question, we can find solutions.”

The work represents a natural evolution of a groundbreaking partnership that began in 2022 with the CHESS project “Clean Air, Health, and School Sustainability,” when Fabian first partnered with BPS’s Sustainability, Energy, and Environment Program, led by Katherine Walsh, to harness data from the district’s unique network of 4,400+ indoor air quality sensors. The partnership yielded a suite of novel, evidence-based decision tools for schools, later published in the Lancet Regional Health Americas, as well as methodologies for measuring classroom air exchange rates using machine learning and ways to characterize temperature to inform extreme heat planning, subsequently published in Indoor Environments.

“Boston is recognized as one of the world’s leading, high-impact policy models for advancing healthy indoor air,” says Fabian, who is also an associate director of BU’s Institute for Global Sustainability. “The Sustainable Schools research group is proud to have contributed to the Boston model alongside Boston Public Schools and the City of Boston.”

But monitoring alone is not sufficient. With support from a Community Clean Air Grant from the City of Boston Air Pollution Control Commission, Fabian’s team is implementing a new four-part research agenda: create methods to detect air pollution events in real time in schools, co-design solutions and communications with teachers, test what works to improve indoor air quality in practice, and translate findings into actionable school policy.

“You can’t fix what you can’t measure,” Fabian has said. And eventually, you have to act, she adds.

The first piece of the project focuses on translating real-time air quality data using BPS’s rooftop sensor network. Jinho Lee, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Environmental Health, is developing an algorithm to understand air pollution outside buildings. 

The team aims to analyze historical patterns of air pollution outside schools and use their findings to automate detection of future pollution events across the city. A potential application of the algorithm is to inform the design of an alert system that could notify school leaders when pollution levels spike and remain high, says Lee. Schools could then turn on air purifiers, close windows, and take other appropriate measures in a timely manner.

“Because we have this unprecedented network of rooftop sensors on most of the Boston Public Schools […] we know there’s variation within the city,” says Ge. “If you only rely on a very small number of [Environmental Protection Agency] monitors, you might miss something.”

But analyzing data alone is not enough. A complementary initiative, led by Pilar Botana Martínez, a recent doctoral graduate and research scientist working with Fabian in the Department of Environmental Health, is centering teacher voices in the solution. The “Know it, Improve it” project, funded by the BU Institute for Early Childhood Well-being, recognizes a critical gap: teachers understand that air quality matters, but they lack clarity on what they can actually do in their own classrooms. The project leverages misinformation theory and is being conducted in collaboration with Arunima Krishna, an associate professor of Mass Communication, Advertising, and Public Relations at BU’s College of Communication.

“Teachers have a pretty good understanding of air quality and its impact on school students, but there is less clarity about what they can do to improve the conditions in the classrooms where they teach, including how to best use some of the resources offered by the school districts, such as portable air cleaners,” says Botana Martínez. She previously conducted one-on-one interviews with school staff members about their perceptions of indoor environmental quality in 2025 and published her findings in Environmental Research: Health.

Over the past several weeks, Botana Martínez and Natascha Nussbaum (SPH‘26) who studied health communication and promotion and completed her practicum with Botana Martínez and the Sustainable Schools team during her MPH, have interviewed approximately 15 teachers to identify knowledge gaps and misconceptions.

“We have definitely heard about gaps in knowledge or misinformation that we were not anticipating, and they have provided us with ideas for how to disseminate these educational materials that we could never have come up with,” Botana Martínez notes. In the coming months, the team will hold co-design workshops where teachers help craft educational materials that are practical and resonate with their experience.

“If we provide accurate, actionable information to teachers, they will be willing to act on it to improve their classrooms,” Botana Martínez says. “That’s why we need teachers’ perspectives if we want to design a communications campaign for this audience.”

At the heart of this summer’s work are a series of experiments. At two BPS schools in Dorchester, Fabian, Ge, and Lee, and a number of volunteer BU graduate and undergrad students, are conducting controlled tests to measure the effectiveness of closed windows, classroom air purifiers, and mechanical ventilation systems adjustments in maintaining clean indoor air.

The team is using incense to simulate pollution to evaluate the efficiency of classroom air filtration, and controlled carbon dioxide releases to measure ventilation rates in the classroom. The approach is rigorous, says Ge, the researchers are not relying on manufacturer claims—they are seeking real-world validation in actual classrooms.

“I think it’s important as scientists to validate performance in the field,” Ge says. “We want to be able to tell BPS, when you send out a notification for teachers to turn on the air purifier to fan speed 2 or 3, that this will protect kids from the outside smoke.”

However, little is currently known about how often the portable air purifiers are used and at what fan speeds, so complementing this summer’s experiments are baseline data from smart plugs that have been monitoring the energy consumption of air purifiers in four pilot schools since last winter. Yirong Yuan, a research data analyst working with Fabian, will later be able to use the data to draw comparisons with use following the implementation of future interventions.

“One approach to evaluating the impact of the educational materials we are co-designing with teachers is to compare portable air cleaner usage before and after the communication campaign,” Botana Martínez explains.

All of these findings feed into BPS’s air pollution response action plan, a document that BPS drafted first, and that the research team is helping refine through feedback and evidence.

“Schools are in the business of educating kids and keeping them safe. Everything that the school does is to meet those goals, and building systems and operations are also part of that. Importantly, teachers, school nurses, and students can also be empowered to take action and keep indoor air clean during events like the wildfire smoke we experienced recently,” Fabian says. “Our project aims to show how this is possible.”

The SPH and BPS partnership reflects a shared understanding that researchers can provide suggestions and analysis, but BPS and the City of Boston must make final decisions about implementation. Fabian’s goal is to complete experiments and offer recommendations by spring 2027.

At its core, the team’s work is about student and staff wellbeing. “School time is such an important period for children,” Botana Martínez says. “If we count all the hours students spend inside schools, it could add up to four years of their lives. If the classroom environment is poor, their learning and health will be impacted during a very vulnerable period.”

For Fabian and her team, the work represents something beyond research—it’s an ongoing conversation about how to communicate science with educators, policymakers, and communities.

“We are learning so much about how to communicate science with people,” Botana Martínez reflects. “We are so grateful for this experience.”

As wildfire smoke becomes a recurring reality across the country, other school districts and cities are watching this partnership closely. By summer 2027, SPH, BPS and the City of Boston will have preliminary results to share—and not only findings, but a roadmap for other schools aiming to protect their students when the air outside is no longer safe to breathe.