Air Aware Labs speeds out of summer

Welcome to the seventeenth edition of our newsletter - where a summer break is a vague concept! This newsletter is aimed at investors, collaborators, future hires and early adopters of our products.

We've been turning our attention to the impact of air pollution on brain health, including our latest article on dementia. As with heart and lung conditions and diseases, air pollution impacts our brain both through long-term risk as well as short-term exacerbation of symptoms. We are building an amazing consortium to deliver a programme focused on this huge but underserved issue. Whether it's protecting ourselves in later life or from early years, please join us on our mission - Personalising Air Quality, for everyone.

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Hot off the press

• Louise's Tech Talks podcast is now live! You can listen through all your favourite podcast providers: Spotify, Apple, YouTube. In it she talks about what Air Aware Labs is aiming to achieve, how she and William Hicks came up with the idea, support from (multiple) alma maters and the transition from roles in government
• Will has been out and about too, having been invited to speak to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust staff meeting. GOSH is leading the way with active travel initiatives, and it was a pleasure to engage with their forward-thinking team on how AirTrack can support their efforts to reduce personal exposure to air pollution
• we are preparing to welcome our latest interns, Orlando Bell and Lydia Jin . We are so excited to bring in their expertise across marketing, sports, data analysis and software engineering.

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Go with us towards clean air

• look out for our imminent launch of AirTrack premium features. This is a huge moment for us! Please help us go viral as we hit social media with the launch!
• thank you again to those who voted for us in the BeLambeth Awards ! It seems we still have a month's wait before hearing whether we will be successful. Taking a deep breath of clean air...
• we continue to be amazed by all the support we get from far and wide. Big shout outs to Agnes Agyepong Simon Brown Pete Wilkes Daniel Wardle Jasmin Thomas Nicky O'Malley Ishtar Govia Andrew Le Seelleur MBE Graham Thomas Suma Chakrabarti Cat Fraser David Savage Dr. Zhong Wei Khor Pooya Kamvari Shailaja Annamraju Andrew Hughes Sebastien Thomas Alexander Hirsch Leith Greenslade Geoffrey Lloyd Tom Maverley Ruaraidh Dobson Zhenghong Liu Ula Caroto, Chartered FCSI (she/her) Noelle Morgan ACC, CPC, ELI-MP Andrea Bonzano Travis Bramley Charlotte Day Charlotte Adams Charlie Meredith Hardy Nick Martin Arif A. Wani Robin Minchom Katherine Marcham Simon Birkett Jason M. We hope you'll all continue with us towards clean air.

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Meet the team

Meet Orlando Bell , our newest intern, starting soon! Orlando says: Growing up in London, I often overlooked the impact of air pollution - smoggy skies and the smell of diesel fumes were just part of city life. It wasn’t until university that I began to understand the scale and severity of the effects that poor air quality can have. I graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in Geography in 2023, specialising in physical and environmental geography. My passion for understanding environmental challenges deepened through my climate science dissertation and subsequent role as a research associate at Oxford’s Climate Science Lab, where I examined climate dynamics and atmospheric physics over Southern Africa. My projects ranged from analysing convective patterns in Zambia to assessing rainfall mechanisms in East Africa, using climate computing and data visualisation techniques, primarily with Python and Climate Data Operators.

Alongside my academic work, I’ve dedicated the past four years to training and competing as a sprinter. Athletes globally invest heavily in optimising every aspect of their training, yet there is an alarming lack of awareness of how air pollution impacts recovery and athletic performance (see article). It is somewhat unbelievable that, given both the dire health effects and negative impacts on sporting performance, air pollution isn’t being addressed more aggressively. In a culture increasingly focused on personalisation and optimisation, the need for high-quality, high-resolution air quality data is critical. Air Aware Labs perfectly fills this space, not just in the UK but globally, ‘personalising air quality for everyone.’ I’m excited to use my experience handling big data from climate science academia in addressing a critical issue which aligns completely with my passions in environmental sustainability, athletic performance and health.

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Get in touch

Please follow Air Aware Labs to stay in touch with our progress. If anything in this newsletter has piqued your interest, please send me (Louise Thomas) or William Hicks a message!

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More newsletters

Although the Venture Builder has finished, we will never forget our fellow ZINC teams.? Please read and subscribe to newsletters of others in cohort 7:

• Pavandeep Rai here
• Marjo Palanee here
• Donna Egan here
• Josh Piddock here
• Guy Naor here
• Veronika Bridgman here
• Lisa Rickers here
• Natalia Baltazar here