News
September 2023: Our research article "Spatiotemporal modeling of air pollutant concentrations in Germany using machine learning" has been published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
August 2023: Frank and Sophie went to Munich to participate in a multi-institutional field campaign measuring urban air quality. Corey and Sophie travelled to Iceland on an EPS/ESE Department Field Trip!
June 2023: Our research article "Predicting Real Refractive Index of Organic Aerosols From Elemental Composition" has been published in Geophysical Research Letters.
January 2023: Sophie heads to Houston and Alaska for the SABRE campaign to work with the cascade impactor (Mini-MOUDI) and study the carbonaceous components of stratospheric aerosols. Yaowei, Corey, and the team of engineers will provide in-person and remote support.
September 2022: Dr. Joshua Cox successfully defended his thesis, "Laboratory and Modeling Studies of the Sources and Sinks of Oxygenated Volatile Organic Compounds in Forests." Good luck at your new position as Assistant Director of Graduate Studies at Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology!
August 2022: Sophie Abou-Rizk joins our group as a Engineering Science and Engineering Ph.D. student in SEAS. Welcome Sophie!
May 20, 2022: Our research article “Evaluating the Impact of Chemical Complexity and Horizontal Resolution on Tropospheric Ozone Over the Conterminous US With a Global Variable Resolution Chemistry Model” has been published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems.
September 10, 2021: Our research article "Organic sulfur products and peroxy radical isomerization in the OH oxidation of dimethyl sulfide” has been published in ACS Earth and Space Chemistry.
June 30, 2021: Our research article "High resolution nanoscale chemical analysis of bitumen surface microstructures" has been published in Scientific Report. It studies how the combination of microscopy and spectroscopy solved the puzzle of the chemical composition of bitumen surface microstructures.
June 14, 2021: Our research article "Towards a chemical mechanism of the oxidation of aqueous sulfur dioxide via isoprene hydroxyl hydroperoxides (ISOPOOH)" has been published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. It investigates the mechanism of oxidation of dissolved sulfur dioxide with the main low-NOx isoprene oxidation products, isoprene hydroxyl hydroperoxides (ISOPOOH). Our work shows that not only the contribution of multifunctional organic hydroperoxides to sulfate formation is important but also that the reaction mechanism and products are more complex than for hydrogen peroxide and simple organic hydroperoxides.
June 10, 2021: Our research article "Revisiting the reaction of dicarbonyls in aerosol proxy solutions containing ammonia: the case of butenedial" has been published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. We studied butenedial reactions in aqueous mixtures and show that despite strong chemical similarities, e.g., with glyoxal with respect to extensive hydration of the aldehyde groups, the chemical reactivity of butenedial is quite different. This demonstrates that the carbon backbone, not just the moiety, influences the fate of dicarbonyls and their ability to produce brown carbon and this finding has important implications for structure activity relationships used to extrapolate behavior of other dicarbonyls.