Guy Robinson, a visiting scholar at Fordham University, was featured in a July 2 New York Times piece about his weekly work tracking New York City’s pollen levels. Robinson explained his method of collecting air samples on sticky tape and analyzing them under a microscope.
When everyone else is thinking about the heat, Guy Robinson is still thinking about that scourge of spring: pollen. He measures how much pollen is in the air, year in and year out.
“It does have to be done,” he said.
This was on Wednesday, at the pollen collection device that he checks every week. It sucks in air, day and night, at about the same rate as a person who is breathing normally. It blows the air onto a clear, slightly sticky tape. Robinson, a pony-tailed visiting scholar at Fordham University, carries the tape to his laboratory and examines it under a microscope.
“You’ve got to be able to recognize literally dozens of pollen types in different orientations,” he said. “They’re not always symmetrical or spherical. Some of them are, and those ones you can generally recognize from any direction, but many of them, if they’re turned slightly, they look different.”
