About Open Air Foundation
A shared commitment to healthier air
The Open Air Foundation is a Swiss nonprofit foundation building practical public infrastructure for airborne environmental health.
Our origins
It started with parents asking about the air
AirGradient began as a volunteer project by concerned parents in Chiang Mai, Thailand, during severe seasonal air pollution. That experience shaped a simple belief: communities need reliable local data to protect health and advocate for cleaner air.
AirGradient grew into an impact-driven open-source air quality monitor company. The foundation can draw on that expertise in hardware, software, public data tools, and air pollution science while focusing on community support, funding, training, and advocacy.
Governance
Our Board of Trustees
Achim Haug
Achim Haug is the CEO and Founder of AirGradient and initiator of the Open Air Foundation. AirGradient began in 2019 as a volunteer project by parents in Chiang Mai, Thailand, responding to severe seasonal air pollution. Before founding the company, Achim worked at Siemens in project management, commercial operations, and finance. He now leads AirGradient’s strategy and business operations, supporting its work to make air quality monitoring more accessible. As a trustee, he brings this combination of community experience and organisational leadership to the foundation’s long-term mission and development.
Dominik Schraner
Dominik (Nick) Schraner is the CTO and co-founder of AirGradient and initiator of the Open Air Foundation. His background spans the telecommunications and software industries, including founding and running a software development consultancy before joining AirGradient. At AirGradient, he leads technology development, manufacturing, and the supply chain. He also contributes to practical training, including workshops helping partners assemble open-source monitors and connect them to air quality data platforms. As a trustee, Nick brings experience in turning technical ideas into working products and systems that support community monitoring.
Dr. Peter Pihlmann Pedersen
Dr. Peter Pihlmann Pedersen is an astronomer, engineer, and co-founder of open-seneca, an air quality monitoring initiative focused on distributed sensor networks and community participation. He holds a PhD in astrophysics and has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich since 2022, developing scientific instruments, robotic observatory software, and data pipelines. Through open-seneca, he helped build air quality monitoring networks with a focus on the Global South, working with partners including the UN and C40 Cities. He brings hands-on experience in sensor technology, research, and public-interest monitoring to the foundation’s board.
Board of Advisors
Dr. Pallavi Pant
Dr. Pallavi Pant is an environmental health scientist whose work focuses on air pollution and health in low- and middle-income countries. She currently serves as the Director of Global Initiatives at the Health Effects Institute (HEI). Her work bridges science-policy pathways, helping connect rigorous science with solutions for cleaner air. She serves on the editorial board of PLOS Global Public Health, chairs the Governing Board of OpenAQ, and advises several international initiatives. She has a Ph.D. in Environmental Health from the University of Birmingham, UK, and a Master’s in Environmental Sciences from the TERI School of Advanced Studies, India.
Roderic (Rod) Jones
Roderic (Rod) Jones studied at Oxford University before spending five years at the UK Meteorological Office. He joined the Department of Chemistry in Cambridge in 1990 where he has been Professor of Atmospheric Science since 2005. He will be Emeritus from December 2026. He has been a Fellow of Queens’ College Cambridge since 1990. Rod Jones’s research interests include air quality/pollution using novel observational techniques and computer models. His group pioneered the use of low-cost sensors, sensor networks and smart analytics for air quality monitoring and exposure-health studies as well as for GHG flux measurement, where he has published widely.
David Carel
David Carel founded and directs the Inspired Air Fund at Renaissance Philanthropy, working to make clean air standard in schools. In 2012 he co-founded Panorama Education, a Y Combinator-backed analytics platform that supports fifteen million students across over 2,000 school districts. He then spent several years in South Africa helping build Funda Wande, which partners with the South African government on early-grade literacy and numeracy. Most recently he was Managing Director at Blueprint Biosecurity, where he led the built-environment program advancing air-cleaning technologies to curb pathogen transmission. He holds degrees from Yale and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
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Contact Open Air Foundation
For funding, community partnerships, governance, and general enquiries.