Associate Professor Roberto Rodríguez in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health recently received grant funding from the HPAI Poultry Innovation Grand Challenge, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to conduct trailblazing research on combating avian flu outbreak in poultry farms across Indiana.
As part of the Grand Challenge, Rodríguez was awarded a three-year grant in the amount of $1,990,659 for the research project, “Enhancing Poultry Farm Biosecurity Using UVC Light Technology to Prevent Avian Influenza Virus Contamination.” The project start date was February 2, 2026, and will run through January 31, 2029. Rodríguez will be working in collaboration with Michigan State University and the University of Colorado Boulder.
“These [poultry] facilities have thousands of chickens housed together that don’t have any immunity to the virus, and if it gets in, it spreads like fire,” says Rodríguez. “The whole farm will need to be depopulated and start over.”
Regarding poultry immunizations, Rodríguez says that isn’t a viable option from a time or cost perspective as the avian flu virus mutates so quickly that by the time an entire farm is immunized, another strain may emerge. On the other hand, UV irradiation is cost-effective and robust, and some new UV technologies (such as far-UVC [222nm]) have the advantage of not penetrating human skin while still being effective at eliminating the virus, making them suitable for use during operation.
“The virus won’t mutate to be resistant to UV because it doesn’t have that capacity,” says Rodríguez. “Ideally, the way to reduce the infections is to make the farms not as crowded as they are, but that is a no-go for the industry.”
Rodríguez says the UVC technology could be implemented in three possible ways: Treat the air coming into the facility’s ventilation system, treat the ground water coming into the facility and/or install far-UVC lamps directly in the facilities to reduce the spread of the virus.
“Part of the project is to validate the [UV] exposures and energies we need to produce to be able to have significant viral inactivation that will actually make an impact [in protecting the poultry operations from infection with avian influenza],” says Rodríguez.
Over the course of the three years, Rodríguez and his team will work to validate a UVC system that will be modelled for implementation in various farm settings and produce a pilot project that can be effectively implemented on farms across the state.
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