Housing as healthcare: Nelson Mota wins NWO/NRO Comenius Teaching Fellowship

News - 15 June 2022 - Communication BK

The importance of biodiversity for public health is widely acknowledged. However, few people are aware of how much housing design decisions influence the interaction between humans, non-humans and the diversity of microorganisms that populate our living environment. With the project Housing as Healthcare: Mapping the correlation between housing design, micro biodiversity and health in The Hague Nelson Mota won the NWO/NRO Comenius Teaching Fellowship.

To overcome this knowledge gap, this project engages architecture and (bio-)medicine teachers and students in a transdisciplinary collaboration and cocreation process. Together they will study residential neighbourhoods in The Hague, developing a pioneering combination of environmental microbiome research with ethnographic research and spatial analysis. The outcome of this project will support the development of innovative Microbiome-inspired housing approaches to improve health and well-being.

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Since 2017, more than 200 education professionals have received a Comenius grant. With this grant they can put their vision on educational innovation into practice. 

Nelson Mota is Associate Professor at the department of Architecture.

The caption and credits of the image are:
Correlation between lung health and percentage of openable windows in selected case studies of housing in Geuzen-Statenkwartier (The Hague). Study developed by students from TU Delft, LUMC and Leiden Hogeschool during the transdisciplinary research workshop organised in the Autumn of 2021.
Image by: Anthéa Karkoullis, Elise van der Oost, Madeleine Waller, Tasos Antonopoulos and Willem Elskamp