AAAR at the University of Arizona by Taiwo Adedayo Ajayi
The University of Arizona student chapter has been active conducting outreach with a local inner-city school (St. Cyril Middle School), especially with the recent installation of an outdoor PurpleAir sensor and weather station. Our chapter has visited the school a number of times to give talks to multiple 8th grade classes about air quality and aerosol particles, emphasizing the significance of the effects that particles have on our daily lives. We engaged students in brainstorming sessions to create questions that would improve their skills and stimulate their curiosity in aerosol research. Empowering kids with tools to examine data from the newly installed outdoor monitoring sensors allowed them to transition from listening and learning to formulating hypotheses and diving straight into actual research themselves. The 8th graders are collaborating with one another and getting excited about making new discoveries such as what day of the week is the cleanest and most polluted and being able to explain why. Our chapter aims to continue working with these classes to allow them to develop their findings into presentations for a future conference.
AAAR at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign by Manho Park
Our chapter secretary Tahsina Alam passed her qualifying exam! Kudos, Tahsina! We hosted the online NASA-UIUC Workshop on Machine Learning Application for Air Quality together with NASA Scientist Julie Nicely and UIUC faculty Chris Tessum. We also had our March Journal club focusing on the aerosol study in the African continent and discussed two papers, Air pollution and development in Africa: impacts on health, the economy, and human capital and Biomass burning aerosol transport and vertical distribution over the South African‐Atlantic region. We will continue to host a journal club to discuss the air quality in developing countries and how to apply the lessons learned from developed countries. Finally, we are looking forward to hosting the Engineering Open House exhibition in April!
NASA-UIUC Workshop
This Issue’s Newsletter Committee:
Editor | Dong Gao, Yale UniversitySenior Assistant Editor | Sarah Petters, University of California, RiversideJunior Assistant Editor | Lindsay Yee, University of California, BerkeleyGuest Contributor | Qian Zhang, UL Research Institute