by Jason Hartke, Ph.D.
At a congressional briefing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, May 19, the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) and With Honor teamed up to bring together leaders from public health, building science, defense, technology and national security to explore a powerful and increasingly urgent idea: positioning buildings to protect public health and strengthen national security. The briefing, titled “Built to Defend: Unlocking the Role of Buildings in America’s Biosecurity Strategy,” focused on the growing recognition that the indoor environments where people spend most of their time can help protect health, strengthen readiness and improve national resilience in the face of evolving biological threats.
As I said in my opening remarks, we have made great progress over the past decade in reshaping our places and spaces to enhance health, prioritize well-being and improve organizational performance — reflected in the exponential growth and adoption of WELL in the past five years to nearly 6.5 billion square feet. But the conversation at this briefing was designed to dig deeper into another important priority, and to offer something of a reframe: positioning buildings as frontline assets for protecting health and strengthening our preparedness in the face of growing and increasingly complex threats.
This added lens is particularly timely given concerns over future pandemics, accidental biological threats, the rapid expansion of high-containment laboratories and the ways emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and gene-editing tools, are making the biosecurity landscape more volatile and fraught.
Fortunately, as the briefing demonstrated, we are meeting the moment. Experts, industry leaders and policymakers are coming together around this issue and coalescing around solutions.
“Healthy, resilient air indoors can be the next great American public health investment.”
— Dr. Rafid Fadul, Chief Medical Officer, ARPA-H
Indoor Air as a Missing Pillar
The event’s featured speaker, Dr. Rafid Fadul, Chief Medical Officer at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), built on that framing by describing indoor air as a missing pillar in the nation’s public health and biosecurity infrastructure. He noted that we have done decades of work to examine and improve the quality of outdoor air. “But we haven’t done the same for indoor air,” said Dr. Fadul. “That is the missing pillar. And in a biosecurity context, it is also a vulnerability we have not yet closed.”
For ARPA-H, he explained, the goal is not incremental improvement. The agency was created to tackle hard problems that markets alone cannot or will not solve, and with an inordinate alacrity. “We fancy ourselves a time machine,” said Dr. Fadul. “We want to do what would ordinarily take three or four decades and do it in three or four years.”
That ethos is central to ARPA-H’s work in this area, including its [BREATHE program — Building Resilient Environments for Air and Total Health](https://arpa-h.gov/explore-funding/programs/breathe). Dr. Fadul described BREATHE as a bold effort to develop the next generation of intelligent building systems that can sense, assess and protect against threats in the indoor environment. The goal, he said, is to create platforms that can monitor what is in our indoor air, translate that information into actionable health risk and trigger responses that help keep occupants safe.
“Healthy, resilient air indoors can be the next great American public health investment,” he said, emphasizing that the same systems that can protect people from everyday respiratory illness and chronic disease could also strengthen our national security. He said, “The same intelligent building platforms that protect Americans from everyday respiratory illnesses and pathogens are exactly what we need to detect and respond to a deliberate and emerging biologic threat.”
He sent a clear message that our buildings are not inactive but instead can be proactively positioned as part of the country’s health and defense infrastructure. “Buildings like the one we’re sitting in are not passive,” he said. “They are infrastructure. And like every other piece of critical infrastructure in this country, they need to be designed to defend people.”
Buildings as Critical Infrastructure
The panel discussion was moderated by Brendan Owens, Chief Sustainability Officer at HKS, who picked up directly on Dr. Fadul’s framing. “Buildings are critical infrastructure,” Owens said. “That’s the walk-off line I’ve been looking for.”
Owens brought a deeply personal national security perspective to the conversation, drawing on his time as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations and Environment at the U.S. Department of Defense. He recalled a conversation with a DOD colleague who led on biosecurity that reshaped how he thought about the built environment. “It changed the way I looked at vulnerability and risk associated with buildings,” he said. “It reframed the opportunity we have to do more than make buildings better for the people inside them; but also, to make them readiness platforms.”
That idea, buildings as readiness platforms, became a throughline for the panel.
The Intersection of Building Science and Biosecurity
*Dr. William Bahnfleth of Penn State University*, a professor of architectural engineering and ASHRAE Fellow, placed the conversation in a longer historical context. For Bahnfleth, the connection between buildings and infection control stretches back more than a century, from Florence Nightingale’s and John Shaw Billings’ work on hospital design and early ventilation standards created to reduce infectious disease transmission. He also noted how anthrax attacks in the early aughts and the COVID-19 pandemic revealed vulnerabilities in the built environment, and both underscored the cost of being underprepared. “What we learned is that planning is important and preparation is even more important,” he said.
Bahnfleth pointed to progress made in building standards, most notably the emergence of ASHRAE Standard 241, which he said has been a major step forward. “We are moving into risk-based standards for building design,” he said. “ASHRAE Standard 241 is the first standard I know of for buildings that addresses airborne infection transmission based on quantitative risk assessment.” The opportunity now, he said, is to combine proven interventions like ventilation, filtration, pressurization, ultraviolet germicidal irradiation and other technologies, with real-time sensing and controls. “If we can integrate sensors with real-time building controls to quantitatively reduce risk, that will be a very important change,” he said.
Toward a “bio radar” for early warning
Matt McKnight, CEO of Perimeter, widened the conversation, noting that the country needs to think more ambitiously about biological intelligence, early warning and more ubiquitous monitoring. McKnight described the current moment as fundamentally different from past eras because biology has entered what he called an engineering phase. The ability to cheaply read, write and synthesize DNA, which has now been accelerated by artificial intelligence, is creating enormous promise, but also new risks. “We are entering the engineering phase of biology,” McKnight said. “And it would be the anomaly in human history if a new engineering technology was not eventually applied in some way to conflict.”
He described a rising challenge for us to simultaneously build the technical architecture needed to detect biological threats early, characterize them quickly and enable rapid response. In other national security areas, he noted that the U.S. has invested in monitoring and verification in areas like cyber security and nuclear detection. But not so in biology. “In bio, we are not yet thinking at the scale we need,” he said, arguing for something more extensive and deployed across critical nodes like airports, hospitals, schools, military installations and other settings where early detection matters.
A First Line of Defense: Biosecure Buildings
Erik Malmstrom, CEO of SafeTraces, brought the discussion back to the human stakes of indoor air and biosecurity. Malmstrom, an Army combat veteran, spoke about why this matters to all the people in our lives, reflecting on the importance of indoor air for his friends and his family. “This is being positioned as biosecurity,” he said. “But this is also fundamentally health. We are all breathing all the time.”
He discussed how traditional biosecurity approaches often rely on data that precludes us from being preventative. In other words, we know something is wrong because someone is already sick, and by that point, the threat may already be spreading. “Clinical and syndromic surveillance are lagging indicators,” he said. “Someone is already sick. The genie is already out of the bottle.” That is why indoor air matters so much – by creating the potential to detect a bio-threat environmentally before it exposes and harms people, he argued. Indoor air is one of the most common and fastest exposure pathways. People breathe tens of thousands of times per day and spend most of their time indoors, where transmission risks can be significantly higher than outside.
To show how indoor air could be an asset in protecting health and safety, he drew a powerful analogy to fire safety recalling how, a hundred years ago, fires were among the most devastating threats to public safety. The response was not one technology or one intervention. It was a full life-safety system: codes, smoke detectors, marked exits, occupancy limits, sprinklers, compartmentalization, fire drills and suppression systems. The result, he said, was a dramatic reduction in fire deaths.
“What does this have to do with bio?” Malmstrom asked. “I would say there are a lot of direct analogies.” In the biosecurity context, he said, the equivalent of a fire code is a standard like ASHRAE 241. Detection and early warning come from biosensors. Suppression comes through ventilation, filtration and germicidal ultraviolet systems. Zoning and airflow management can help contain risk. Outbreak protocols can guide action.
“What we’re working toward is autonomous, end-to-end environmental biosecurity,” Malmstrom said. “Rapid detection, risk assessment and mitigation — all tied into the building systems that can respond.”
Operational Readiness and the Defense Imperative
Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Thomas Bostick, former Chief of Engineers at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and now head of Bostick Strategy Group, brought the conversation squarely into the frame of military readiness and operational execution.
Bostick emphasized that leaders across government and the military often face enormous backlogs, competing mandates and limited resources. The challenge is not always a lack of will, he suggested. Often, it is the need to connect the issue to mission priorities that already command attention.
For the Department of Defense, he said, that means connecting indoor air, biosecurity and building performance to operational readiness. “The number one priority in the Pentagon is warfighting,” Bostick said. “So the question is how does this support warfighting?” That connection, he argued, is clear. Healthy barracks, safe facilities, resilient installations and protected troops are all part of readiness.
“Operational readiness through barracks, through installations, through ships — that is where this fits,” he said. Bostick also stressed the importance of taking practical steps and building momentum.
“Don’t be afraid to take baby steps,” he said. “It is hard to move things in this town. Use the open doors where you have them.”
A Moment of Opportunity
The briefing ended with panelists pointing to real momentum already underway. Malmstrom underscored ARPA-H’s more than $150 million investment in BREATHE as evidence that progress is happening fast. “The technology is being built in quick order,” he said. “We are moving from development to deployment, not just showing that the technology works, but connecting it all the way to health outcomes.”
McKnight pointed to early warning programs already showing results, including airport-based monitoring that has detected pathogens before they appeared through traditional surveillance systems.
“These systems are working,” he said. “They are moving forward, and they are being exported internationally.”
Bahnfleth urged policymakers and building leaders to take advantage of the tools already available, especially standards like ASHRAE 241. “If you want to improve your building from the point of view of biosecurity, this is a big step in that direction,” he said. And Bostick returned to the importance of readiness. “This is an operational readiness issue,” he said. “There are spaces where we can support that right now.”
Overall, the briefing made clear that buildings have a tremendous role to play in the future of America’s biosecurity strategy. As Dr. Fadul said at the opening, healthy, resilient indoor air can become one of the next great American public health investments, while also being one of the most consequential biosecurity investments of our time.
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