Almost one year has passed since AQMEL moved to UC Berkeley, and we are excited to share some of the accomplishments of the team since our last update.
Research Updates
Khanh and Dr. Ivey recently concluded the SCAQMD project, where we investigated the meteorological impacts on ozone and fine particulate matter in the South Coast Air Basin. We thank our collaborators at Georgia Tech and Envair for their hard work on this project. We also thank Dr. Sang-Mi Lee for her leadership on this work. Ph.D. student Ziqi Gao (Georgia Tech) recently published the first paper from the project, and stay tuned for the other published works to come.
Gao et al., 2022
The field campaign for the Community Air Grant was successfully completed! Ivette, Khanh, and Andrea led wearable sensor deployments and community workshops from October 2021 to June 2022. We look forward to sharing our findings, which will be co-produced with the community members of West San Bernardino. Thank you to the UC Riverside and Riverside City College student research assistants for your invaluable support.
Photo Credit: Ivette Torres
Our newly funded EPA wildfire grant kicked off with assistance from lead graduate researcher Yi Ji and Bay Area Collaborative facilitator, Rebecca Sugrue. So far we have established new connections with the other three EPA STAR awardees from Bay Area institutions and community leaders in Stockton, CA. We look forward to growing these synergies in the upcoming months.
We kicked off two other collaborative projects this spring, including work on investigating PM2.5 formation regimes in California (Duncan) and characterizing time-activity patterns to improve exposure estimates (Yi).
New Group Members
AQMEL welcomes rising 2nd year graduate student Cam Phelan to the group! She is currently investigating CMAQ model sensitivities and biases during extreme pollution events. Welcome Cam!
AQMEL also welcomes several undergraduate researchers to the group. Charlotte Mourad is a civil engineering student who is leading the development of air pollution resilience plans as part of the CARB Community Air Grant to service the West San Bernardino Community. She is also the recipient of the 2022 SURF UROC Gates Foundation Fellowship. Congratulations Charlotte! AQMEL also welcomes Zoe Haynes, Parker Yang, Srishti Hazra, Yasamine Heidary, and Paige Lyles, who will assist with the EPA wildfire project.
Other Team Updates
Congratulations to Project Coordinator, Ivette Torres, on her acceptance to the CEE graduate program! Upon arrival, she will begin working on a project to investigate the impacts of warehousing on vulnerable communities in CA. Her work is funded by a 2022-23 CEEJ Seed Grant. Congratulations Ivette!
Congratulations to Jennifer for passing her prospectus exam and advancing to Ph.D. candidacy!
Dr. Abi Lawal recently published a paper from her dissertation in ES&T on airport pollution and satellite data. See her paper here!
Lawal et al., 2022
Andrea is off to the NASA SARP program for the 2022 summer opportunity. She was also recently awarded the Ford Motor Company Undergraduate Award for her work on the Community Air Grant. Congratulations Andrea!
Dr. Ivey successfully relaunched the offering of CE 218C, a graduate course on air quality modeling, where students learned to run CMAQ on Berkeley's Savio Cluster. Thanks to the Savio organization for the instructional allocation! Thank you to the Spring 2022 students for a great first offering!
The AQMEL wet lab is complete and is ready for research!
Please stay tuned for more updates to come!