Student Chapter Updates

Anthropocene Institute

AAAR at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU)/Center for Aerosol Science and Engineering (CASE)

Jhao-Hong Chen, President of Student Chapter

The seminar series featuring both invited guest speakers and internal researchers in Spring 2025, held by the AAAR Student Chapter at Washington University in St. Louis/Center for Aerosol Science and Engineering was a great success! Featured guest speakers include Dr. Prakash Gautam, Dr. Ann Marie Carlton, Dr. Chandra Venkataraman, and Dr. Susanne Hering, while the featured internal researchers include Kaiying Wang, Dr. Dhruv Mitroo, Dr. Chi Li, and Inderjeet Singh. We appreciate the support from advisor Dr. Rajan Chakrabarty and junior faculty members Dr. Lu Xu and Dr. Jenna Ditto. We plan to have a transition in leadership by the end of this summer and look forward to upcoming events in Fall 2025.

The seminar topics for the speakers are listed below: 

1. Dr. Prakash Gautam: Light Scattering from Spherical and Irregular Particles Over a Wide Angular Range
2. Dr. Ann Marie Carlton: The Science and Technology Policy of Agricultural Air Pollution
3. Dr. Chandra Venkataraman: Cleaning India’s Air: From science to solutions
4. Dr. Susanne Hering: The Challenge of Monitoring Ultrafine Airborne Particles
5. Kaiying Wang: Low-Temperature CO2 Methanation Using Ni–MgO Catalyst Prepared via Sol-Gel Method
6. Dr. Dhruv Mitroo: Initial findings of soot properties on ocular toxicity
7. Dr. Chi Li: Decompose changes in PM2.5 air pollution and its health impacts
8. Inderjeet Singh: Impact of dust shape on the UV-Vis retrieval of NO2

AAAR at the University of California, Riverside (UCR)

Erin Bowey, Chapter President

In the Spring of 2025, AAAR UCR Student Chapter had a busy and fulfilling quarter full of aerosol research, learning, and discussion!

Firstly- we have established a new Journal Club! We meet biweekly after taking time to read a selected paper within a subcategory of current and topical aerosol research–such as ice nucleation particles, wildfire plume composition, and atmospheric plastics–to discuss the work together (with plenty of snacks!). The conversations we’ve been able to have in our shared field that is facilitated by this club and colored by various perspectives and focuses has been invigorating and inspiring!

UCR AAAR Chapter also had the great honor of hosting Dr. Akua Asa-Awuku from the University of Maryland, a previous AAAR President and UCR Professor, for her fantastic talk: Hygroscopicity of nano-plastic particles and implications for cloud formation and climate, for the June 2025 AS&T Lecture Series. It was a pleasure to introduce such an accomplished and passionate aerosol researcher and science communicator.

UCR hosted several other special seminars from aerosol and atmospheric researchers, and AAAR student chapter took these opportunities to meet and converse with the speakers about their work! We’re grateful to have learned from talks by Dr. Nate Slade, Dr. James J. Schauer, and Dr. Eric Wolf. Dr. Wolf’s talk on what we can observe and learn from exoplanetary atmospheres will motivate the topic of a future Journal Club Meeting!

Finally, we rounded out the end of the academic year with a super fun scary movie night, where we watched The Fog (1980), a movie about what lurks within suspended aqueous droplets, and enjoyed (v) sugar cookie decorating. 

Thank you, everyone, for a great Spring!

AAAR at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)

Oladayo Oladeji, Chapter President

We recently hosted the 13th Annual Donora Memorial Lecture on May 23rd, 2025, at the Bosch Conference Room at CMU. This lecture honors the 1948 Donora air pollution episode, which affected the western Pennsylvania community. Our guest speaker this year was Dr. Jasper Kok from UCLA, who gave a great talk on “The mysterious abundance of coarse desert dust in our atmosphere.”

In addition to the lecture, several of our members graduated from their Ph.D. and Master’s programs. We’re incredibly proud of them and wish them all the best in their next chapters. We also organized a community flower planting activity here in Pittsburgh as part of our ongoing outreach efforts.

AAAR at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)

AAAR at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)

AAAR at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)

AAAR at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)

AAAR at the University of California Irvine (UCI)

Lena Gerrit, Chapter President

On January 31st graduate student Anna Kapp shared her research into “New Particle Formation during the Sail Campaign” and on 3/14 we had Pi day seminars by graduate students Audrey Miles on “Machine Learning Potential Development for Advanced Nuclear Fuels” and Jeremy Wakeen on “A Method to Deconvolute TDCIMS Thermal Desorption Profiles using EPA’s Positive Matrix Factorization Model”. Our NASA JPL Tour is on July 28th.