Dr. Chen was trained as an environmental engineering engineer from the National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan. He has a broad range of research experience in aerosol science and technology and has over 80 journal papers and 5 patents. He joined the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering of Virginia Commonwealth University in August 2017 and now is an associate professor. Dr. Chen has been working on various aerosol projects over the past 6 years for the CFR (Center for Filtration Research under the Particle Lab of the University of Minnesota), supported by an industrial consortium, including 3M, Boeing Airplane, Ford, WL-Gore, Cummins, AO Smith, Donaldson Company, Samsung, TSI, etc. During the COVID-19, he helped the Justice of Canada to evaluate KN-95 respirators imported from China. Now he is typically focusing on air and liquid purification and indoor and outdoor air quality monitoring and control.

OpenTox Virtual Conference 2023

Personal sampling of respirable and ultrafine particles in workplaces

Correlations between particle emission, respiratory exposure, and toxicity response remain much uncertain for many emerging workplaces, such as nanomaterial manufacturing and 3-D printing. Dr. Shawn Chen has been working on assessing potential worker exposure to particle emissions in different workplaces with both real-time aerosol instruments and personal samplers developed by his team. In the talk, he is showing the key concepts in the development of personal samplers and how they are applied to characterize particle emissions from different sources. The measurement results from field studies of several nanopowder manufacturing workplaces will be discussed. Besides, the method to characterize the emission from 3-D printers will be shown. The aim of this talk is to provide suggestions on how to accurately collect emitted particles from different sources to help fill the gap between respiratory exposure and health response.