Aslihan Karatas presents mold map research at SparkTalks
1
Assistant Professor Aslihan Karats recently presented a three-minute talk called “Developing Mold Map for Improving Living Conditions in the Southwest Side of Chicago” during SparkTalks at UIC.
“I shared why detecting mold matters and what our MoldMap approach makes it different. This project doesn’t just study the problem; it solves the problem with the community,” said Karats, director of the Built Environment and Infrastructure Laboratory at UIC.
The initiative, which is sponsored by HUD, is being piloted on the Southwest side of Chicago, an area characterized by aging residential structures and recurring moisture-related maintenance issues. Through field data collection from 100 representative homes, the project will capture parameters such as wall assembly type, ventilation rate, moisture content, and interior surface conditions.
The empirical observations will be coupled with computational heat-air-and-moisture-transfer simulations to quantify the relationship among housing characteristics, environmental variables, and mold growth potential. The model will analyze this combined dataset to identify key predictors of hidden mold formation and generate localized mold-risk maps.
The goal of the research is to develop a data-driven predictive tool to help community organizations and city agencies identify and map homes at risk of hidden mold growth without costly physical inspections.