Community Ambassador alum Alexandru Luchiian builds air quality sensors and leads citizen-science air quality initiatives in Romania
A Community Ambassador Impact Story by Sulaiman Mathew-Wilson, Health Effects Institute Fellow at OpenAQ
Alexandru Luchiian, a 2023 OpenAQ Community Ambassador, is a passionate advocate for building and using air sensors to measure air quality and save lives by identifying sources of pollution. From air and water quality monitoring to wildfire and flood detection, Alexandru has spearheaded a wide range of technical projects that promote citizen science and turn environmental data into action.
Alexandru’s air quality journey started in 2018, when he attended a local hackathon where he was given the task of coming up with a technical solution to community problems. At the time, he had begun developing an alarm system equipped with facial recognition technology designed to compare the faces of people who entered in the morning with those detected during an evacuation. However, at the hackathon, he met colleagues who wanted to develop an air quality monitoring system. This experience sparked his interest in studying the problem of polluted air, building something professional for usage by all citizens, and, in Alexandru’s words, “serving as a hero for humanity.”
In Romania, air pollution is a significant issue, particularly in urban environments. Aiming to combat this, Alexandru launched a national initiative called “Strop de aer” for measuring air quality with open-source sensors. Every year, he conducts a comparative study on air pollution in Romania’s three biggest cities to identify the most polluted neighborhoods and to attempt to understand why this is the case. Today, the project features 220 sensors in more than 25 cities, with a localized map for each, enabling residents to access and visualize air quality as it affects them.
Alexandru is a major advocate for education as a means of solving environmental issues in Romania. For the past four years, he has led a national project called “Ora de Sustenabilitate” (Sustainability Hour) for environmental education in schools, presenting solutions to measure pollution, teaching students about sustainability and things that can be done to protect the planet. Starting out as a self-coordinated volunteer effort, he has now coordinated alongside more than forty volunteers in total, teaching over 1,000 kids each year. He also recently piloted a project called “Aerul din școala noastră” (The Air in Our School) to measure air quality in schools, where he is installing indoor and outdoor sensors, leading workshops regarding air quality, and building CO2 semaphores to be used by students. Highlighting the growth of this project, Alexandru shared, “In the first year, I did this all on my own. After that, I coordinated with seven volunteers, last year I had twenty-four, and this year twelve.” Even with increased volunteer support, Alexandru still assumes a lot of the responsibility, stating, “I taught 650 students this year by myself.” As this initiative has grown, it has sparked larger interest, with many other schools wanting to replicate the model that Alexandru developed.
In addition to this work, Alexandru is an innovator, having built his own air sensors (two types for indoor and two types for outdoor) for measuring air quality. His particulate matter sensors have been evaluated by South Coast Air Quality Management District: Air Quality Sensor Performance Evaluation Center (AQ-SPEC). In collaboration with the Faculty of Environmental Science and Engineering at the Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai (UBB), he has done a collocation study with several other commercially available brands of particulate matter air sensors and a reference monitor. Through this, he is now able to implement correction algorithms that address the bias of his own sensors. In addition, he is participating in another collocation study that includes reference monitors from the CNR — National Instituto Di Aria at the Eco Observatory in Lecce, Italy.
Because of the success of Alexandru’s work, he was invited by the Faculty of Environmental Science and Engineering at Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai (UBB) to do a PhD program in the department of Air Quality. He will begin this year.
Alexandru also shares, “The OpenAQ ambassador program was the ‘kick’ I needed to become more popular in my country — becoming the second private network from Romania that measures air quality. I have started to be involved in TV interviews, shows, and everything related to air quality.”
As evidenced by his work, Alexandru is deeply committed to air quality actions, monitoring, and community engagement. His goals today have not deviated from when he first began this work: empowering the use of low-cost sensors as a certified and valid tool to measure air quality. As small, precise, and cheap as they can be designed and built, the more lives can be saved. By identifying the problem and the source of the pollution, human health outcomes and environmental protection as a whole will improve dramatically.
Learn more about Alexandru Luchiian at stropdeaer.ro, or visit them on Facebook and LinkedIn! Follow OpenAQ and visit ambassadors.openaq.org to learn more about our Clean Air Community Ambassador program.
Relevant Links:
- South Coast Air Quality Management District: Air Quality Sensor Performance Evaluation Center (AQ-SPEC). https://www.aqmd.gov/aq-spec/evaluations/summary-table
- Alexandru gives a talk at CNR-Lecce: “Evaluating Open-Source Air Quality Sensors in the Mediterranean versus ACTRIS sensors — OpenAirSen.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpzErtg2SWk
