Elizabeth Hénaff
-
Assistant Professor
She earned an International Baccalaureate with honors in 1999 from Lycée Jeanne d’Albret, in France, and then entered the University of Texas, in Austin, where she earned a B.S. in Computer Science (2005) and an M.A. in Plant Biology (2008). In 2013 she earned her Ph.D., cum laude, in Bioinformatics, from the University of Barcelona.
At the center of her research is a fascination with the way living beings interact with their environment. This inquiry has produced a body of work that ranges from scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, to projects with landscape architects, to artistic practice. She has made contributions to understanding how plants respond to the force of gravity, how genome structure changes in response to stress, and most recently has turned her attention to the ubiquitous and invisible microbial component of our environment.
She has presented her research findings at scientific conferences such as the International Society of Microbial Ecology, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the International Conference on Transposable Elements, and her design projects have been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale and at local Brooklyn galleries, among other venues.
Prior to coming to the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Hénaff undertook postdoctoral research at Barcelona’s Center for Genomic Regulation, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Weill Cornell Medical College, and was a research associate at the MIT Media Lab. Her teaching experience includes a program of international workshops implemented for varied audiences, from students at Rockefeller University to technologists at the Tokyo FabLab.
Research News
Developing design criteria for active green wall bioremediation performance
This research was led by Elizabeth Hénaff, Assistant Professor in the Department of Technology, Culture, and Society department with collaborators from Yale University.
Air pollution “is the biggest environmental risk to [human] health” according to the World Health Organization. While air-pollution related deaths are strongly associated with a person’s age and their country of origin’s economic status, poor indoor air quality correlates to health impacts ranging from transient symptoms such as difficulty concentrating and headaches, to chronic, more serious symptoms such as asthma and cancer, in both developing and developed nations.
Emerging data indicates that mechanical/physio-chemical air handling systems inadequately address common indoor air quality problems, including elevated CO2 levels and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), with compounding negative impacts to human health. In this new study, the researchers extend Hénaff's preliminary work suggesting that active plant-based systems may address these challenges.
The researchers investigated relationships between plant species choice, growth media design (hydroponic versus organic), and factors of design-related performance such as weight, water content, and air flow rate through growth media. The team studied these variables in relation to CO2 flux under low levels of light such as one might find in indoor lighting environments. The proposed methodology was designed to improve upon the methods of previous studies.
Across the species, hydroponic media produced 61% greater photosynthetic leaf area compared to organic media which produced 66% more root biomass. The investigators measured CO2 concentration changes driven by differing plant and growth media (organic vs. hydroponic) treatments within a semi-sealed chamber.
The results of this experiment point to two critical considerations: First, growth media selection should be considered a primary design criterion, with potentially significant implications for the ultimate CO2 balance and biological function of installations, especially as it relates to patterns of plant development and water availability. Secondly, influxes of CO2 concentrations during the initiation of active air flow and early plant development may have to be accounted for if the patterns of measured CO2 fluxes are found to persist at scale. In the context of active air flow systems and indoor air pollutant bioremediation (CO2 included), relative rates of CO2 production and sequestration as they relate to potential VOC remediation rates become critical for short term indoor air quality and implications for heating, ventilation and A.C. energy use.
Phoebe Mankiewicz, Aleca Borsuk, Christina Ciardullo, Elizabeth Hénaff, Anna Dyson; Developing design criteria for active green wall bioremediation performance: Growth media selection shapes plant physiology, water and air flow patterns; Energy and Buildings; Volume 260, 2022
Research Centers, Labs, and Groups
Laboratory for Living Interfaces
At the Laboratory for Living Interfaces we study the interaction of organisms ...
