🦠 Biosecurity Futures | The Air We Share

The Air We ShareClean Air, Far-UVC and Defences That Work Against Anything

Wednesday, 11 November 2026 · 18:15–19:45ETH Zürich, HG E 33.1

We treat drinking water as infrastructure. It is filtered, monitored and regulated, and nobody thinks twice about it. Indoor air, which we share with everyone in the room and through which respiratory pathogens actually travel, is barely regulated at all.

That gap matters more than it used to. Vaccines and treatments have to be built against a specific pathogen. If we cannot predict what the next engineered one will look like, the most valuable defences are those that work against anything.

This session covers what those defences are: ventilation and filtration, germicidal ultraviolet light including a wavelength that may be safe to use in occupied rooms, and protective equipment good enough to keep essential workers functioning through a severe pandemic. It also covers what remains genuinely uncertain about each of them.

Most of these technologies are not blocked on science. They are blocked on standards, regulation, procurement and manufacturing. If you come from engineering or the physical sciences, this is probably the session where you will recognise problems you could work on.

Biosecurity Futures is an introductory series on global catastrophic biological risks, hosted by the Zurich Biosecurity Hub at ETH Zürich.

Biosecurity Futures Series Schedule:

Worse Than Nature: Why the Deadliest Pandemics Won't Be Natural Ones — 30 Sep

AI Meets Biology: What Frontier Models Actually Change — 12 Oct (Monday)

Mirror Life: A Risk We Could Still Prevent — 28 Oct

The Air We Share: Clean Air, Far-UVC and Defences That Work Against Anything — 11 Nov

Layers of Defence: Screening DNA, Spotting Outbreaks, Stacking Imperfect Safeguards — 2 Dec

Open to students, researchers and staff from all departments and all universities, and to interested people from outside academia. Free.

Subscribe to the calendar to get all five sessions.

More at zurichbiosecurity.ch. Questions: [email protected]