Fluids & Health: Viral Respiratory Disease Transmission Through the Air

The Challenge:

Infectious diseases and their study pose many challenges, from technical challenges in sampling, detection, identification of pathogen properties; the challenges of animal models and field studies and their inherent variability; to the need to translate insights from the lab to technical innovations in infrastructure or policy measures at various scales, for example, to be able minimize lockdowns and global societal impacts during emerging epidemics/pandemics. These and many more associated challenges require rigorous interdisciplinary fundamental science dedicated to deciphering the mechanisms underlying contamination and infectious agent adaptation and transmission at various scales and in a range of disease systems and environments.  To achieve this goal, traditionally disconnected scientific communities have to cross-pollinate.

The Goal: 

The Fluids and Health 2026 Lorentz workshop builds on the Fluids and Health series of gatherings, from the inaugural 2019 iteration themed the "Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission", Cargese, Corsica, to 2022 Gordon Research Conference (GRC 2022), themed Fluids in Disease Transmission and Contamination: Contamination and Infectious Disease Transmission from the lens of fluid physics and across scales;  the 2024 workshop, Fluid dynamics of disease transmission at The International Congress in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ICTAM), and the more recent 2025 BAI: Biophysics of Airborne Infection: from Soft Matter to Biology, Montpellier.

This Lorentz Center Fluids and Health 2026 meeting aims to provide the participants an international forum to exchange on frontier research at the growing and exciting research intersection between bio- and fluid physics and health, with particular focus on viral respiratory transmission through the air, at various scales.  Similar to prior iterations, discussions will span technical, theoretical, methodological, experimental, clinical and translational challenges relevant for a range of open scientific questions at the nexus of a range of disciplines, including viroscience, microbiology, physiology, bio- and fluid physics, soft matter, engineering, applied mathematics and modelling across scale, and health broadly defined.

Our goal is to continue developing a shared language across these disciplines and a common vision to formulate and advance a unified research and collaborative agenda in this area.  Following the workshop, a joint summary perspective paper will be developed, strengthening the synergies and collaborations among the participants.

Themes and Sessions:

This Lorentz Center 2026 workshop will focus on three central themes around which activities and team discussions will take place: 

• Measurement & technological bottlenecks: air sampling & sensing capabilities; efficiency of live viral particle recovery; and detection thresholds continue to pose significant challenges for studying airborne viral transmission in clinical, field, and laboratory settings
  
  
• The airborne phase: biological and physical factors influencing respiratory virus transport and transmission and their quantification.
  
  
• Generation of respiratory microdroplets: direct measurements vs. commonly assumed mechanisms; animal vs. human vs. engineered models and implications for gold-standard benchmarking of quantification and modeling
  
  

We very much look forward to welcoming you at the Fluids and Health 2026 at the Lorentz Center in June!