This informational webinar about the CIRES Visiting Fellow Program answers: What is the program? How do I apply? What do I need to include in my application? How do I identify a sponsor? And more!
Please join this live event, led by Christine Wiedinmyer, Associate Director for Science, and Susan Sullivan, Director of Diversity and Inclusion, and ask any questions you may have. Register here: https://bit.ly/VFPinfo. 

Learn more about the Visiting Fellows Program.

Join Dr. Lori Hunter, Director of the Institute of Behavioral Sciences and Professor of Sociology, for a C-SEF Seminar on November 3 in the CIRES Auditorium. This talk will present a general overview of the state of empirical, social science understanding of the connections between human migration and environmental context and change. Specific examples will be provided from Dr. Hunter’s research focused on rural Mexico, while important recent advancements and continuing gaps will also be explored.

This Center for Social and Environmental Futures (C-SEF) Big Picture* Seminar will take place in the CIRES Auditorium (CIRES 338) at 3:30 pm.

A reception will follow in the CIRES Map Room (CIRES 340) at 4:30 pm. All are welcome!

This event will also be livestreamed: https://youtu.be/UuOLbiQIFzQ 

*C-SEF's Big Picture seminars will address questions pertaining to long-term and large-scale futures, such as how economic growth, geopolitics, global security, inequality, migration patterns, and other development trends will be affected by environmental problems, and how they will affect humankind’s ability to achieve environmental goals.

Christina Kumler-Bonfanti and Ryan Lagerquist from CIRES will be speaking at two in-person seminars on Deep Learning hosted by CIRES CGA. These seminars are meant to be tutorial (lecture-based) style and are meant for all skill levels. Christina and Ryan have many years of experience with machine-learning applications to atmospheric sciences. 

We will also provide snacks and drinks. To help us with the logistics, Please fill out this RSVP form by Wednesday October 19th.

Day 2 - Friday, November 4, 2:30 - 4:30 pm (CIRES Fellows Room, Ekeley S274 ) -  This will be a jupyter notebook follow-along tutorial covering the basics of neural networks. Participants will be encouraged to get their computers and code along.

The Ice Nucleating Properties of Southern Great Plains Mineral Dusts
Guy Symonds,
ANYL 1st year, CU Boulder

"Mixed phase clouds, a collection of supercooled liquid and frozen water droplets, are potentially important regulators of the Earth’s climate. In the troposphere, water droplets are primarily frozen through the immersion-mode freezing mechanism, where a rare particle within the droplet acts as a template and catalyzes the production of the ice phase. Commonly, these ice nucleating particles in the atmosphere are some type of suspended mineral dust. The research being presented examines the ice nucleating behavior of previously unprobed dust samples in the Southern Great Plains area in Oklahoma, United States of America. This location was subject to a field campaign due to its isolation from major industrial activity on the North American continent and so it serves as a “Continental background site”. By examining the ice nucleating activity of these dusts, the contribution to ambient aerosol in the Southern Great Plains area can be determined, as well as their relative contribution to total aerosol ice nucleating activity. Furthermore, these dusts were subjected to aging processes designed to simulate environmental weathering processes to further investigate the variability of their ice nucleating activity and how their freezing properties correlate with chemical changes caused by the aging."

and

Formation of a Polariton Through the Creation of Micro Cavities with an Active Layer of PFO
Nicole Silver,
ANYL 1st year, CU Boulder

"The presence of an exciton polariton, a quasiparticle formed through the strong coupling between a photon and an electron hole pair, creates important properties that have the potential to significantly increase the absorption efficiency of organic semiconductor materials in a solar cell. In my undergraduate research at Cornell University in Andrew Musser’s Light Matters Research Group, I focused on finding evidence of a polariton in the organic semiconductor material Perfluorooctanesulphonate (C8F17O3S), also known as PFO. This presentation will outline the intricate process of forming micro cavities, which involves the development of a spin coating technique and identification of several parameters specific to the polymer PFO. These are determined through absorption spectroscopy, profilometry, evaporation in vacuum, angle dependent reflectivity, and simulations. The process of creating a micro cavity and using an angle dependent reflectivity goniometer to discover two polariton branches in a PFO micro cavity will be discussed along with the identification of polariton branches in two other materials, TM82 and TM83."

Join McMurdo scientist, Yingfei Chen, from McMurdo Antarctica for a 10-15 minute lesson on an Introduction to the Upper Atmosphere followed by a Q&A. Join live with your classroom on camera and ask your questions directly to Yingfei and his colleagues. 

Register for the link: https://bit.ly/3Akryav

More information about CIRES Education & Outreach's Science Show & Share: https://cires.colorado.edu/outreach/programs/science-show-share

Introduction to the Upper Atmosphere 

• What and where is the upper atmosphere? 
• Why do we want to study the upper atmosphere? 
• What are we studying in the upper atmosphere? 
• What are we studying in the upper atmosphere? 
• How do we study the upper atmosphere? 
• What is LIDAR (light detection and ranging)? Check out our instrument!

About the Speaker - Yingfei Chen

Yingfei Chen is a Ph.D. student in Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder who works with CIRES fellow Dr. Xinzhao Chu. His research uses lidar technologies to observe the middle and upper atmosphere from Boulder, Colorado, with a focus on thermosphere-ionosphere Na (TINa) layers. He and Dr. Chu worked together and made the first discovery of the regular occurrence of TINa layers in the world. His work earned him second authorship in a Geophysical Research Letters paper published during the first year of his Ph.D. program, and he will soon be submitting another paper to the Geophysical Research Letters as first author. 

Please join Waleed Abdalati and Christine Wiedinmyer as they discuss the Career Track promotion process and related updates, give guidance on the promotion package preparation, and touch on the promotion from Research Scientist III to Senior Research Scientist. There will also be a Q&A at the end. This session is geared toward associate scientists and research scientists.

Zoom: https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/97849097213

The overwhelming majority of humans that will exist throughout our lifespan as a species have probably not been born yet. What moral implications does this possibility have for our decisions today? How should this possibility affect how we think about policy issues, such as climate change, and personal decisions, such as how much to save and spend, and on what. In this discussion, Taylor Jaworski (Economics) and Matt Burgess (Environmental Studies) consider these issues in the context of "longtermism" as a new social movement. The conversation will touch on environmental issues, existential risk, and the implications of future economic growth, among other topics. 

This event is co-sponsored by CIRES Center for Social and Environmental Futures (C-SEF) and the Benson Center. Pizza will be served. 

Additional Resources: https://www.colorado.edu/center/benson/free-minds-outside-classroom-reso...

ANYL Alumni Career Panel: Melissa Trainer (NASA), and Dan Bon (CDPHE)

Dr. Melissa Trainer is a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) with expertise in the composition of planetary atmospheres and the production of organic molecules and aerosols via in situ synthesis pathways. Dr. Trainer currently serves as a Deputy Principal Investigator (PI) for the Dragonfly mission to Saturn's moon Titan, part of the NASA Planetary Science New Frontiers Program. She is also the lead for the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS), which enables the investigation of Titan's surface composition and characterization of potential prebiotic chemistry. She has spent more than two decades characterizing the properties of Titan and early Earth aerosol analogs, with publications on the chemical, optical, and isotopic properties of organic hazes. Dr. Trainer is a member of the Mars Science Laboratory Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument team, for which she led the campaign to conduct the first in situ multi-year study of the seasonal variations of the composition of the Mars atmosphere through surface mass spectrometry measurements. She received her undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Franklin and Marshall College in 2000, and her PhD in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Colorado-Boulder in 2006. She has been a scientist at NASA since 2009.

Daniel Bon, PhD. Supervisor, Air Toxics Measurement and Special Projects Unit, Technical Services Program, Air Pollution Control Division, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Daniel Bon completed his PhD in Atmospheric Chemistry in 2011 and the University of Colorado, Boulder and the NOAA ESRL Chemical Sciences Division, where his research focused on PTR-MS field measurements of volatile organic compounds in the atmosphere. Since 2011, Dr. Bon has worked for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, Air Pollution Control Division. From 2016-2022, Dr. Bon built and operated the Colorado Air Monitoring Mobile Laboratory. In 2021, he became the Unit Supervisor for the newly created Air Toxics Measurement and Special Projects Unit created to respond to HB21-1189 and HB22-1244 Air Toxics bills passed by the Colorado State Legislature. His growing team includes 7 scientists and 3 mobile measurement labs. Students could learn about what we do by reading the summaries of the new Colorado Air Toxics bills our group is working to implement and a recent press release: hb21-1189, hb22-1244, press release

We have asked the speakers to present for 12-15 min on their perspective on careers outside academia for PhD chemists, and in particular for graduates of our ANYL PhD program. For example, they may address the following questions: what path took you to where you are? What strengths from the ANYL program helped you in your career? What could have the program done to make that better? What do you wish someone had told you when you were a PhD student? What advice would you give to current PhD students and postdocs? A Q&A session will follow, prioritizing questions from current students and postdocs.

Cycling to Climate Learning: How Educational Adventures Build Understanding and Engagement with Dave Morris and Nadia White of the Wild Rockies Field Institute

Journalists and scientists have been working – sometimes in unison, sometimes at cross purposes -- to communicate the understanding and implications of anthropogenic climate change since the end of the 1950s. It has proven challenging work as the human issue-attention cycle frustrates the ability of audiences to focus on the implications of change that is slow, far away or in the future.

Teaching the causes, impacts and implications of climate change from the seat of a bicycle is our attempt to interrupt the issue-attention cycle before our audience reaches the off-ramp of their awareness. Offered through the Wild Rockies Field Institute and the University of Montana, Cycle the Rockies is an experiential learning opportunity that gives college students a chance to slow down and take a personal look at factors that inform climate change policy debates.

The 27-day, 600-plus mile bicycle tour across western Montana considers energy production and transmission, as well as climate change impacts and implications in the state. The students tour a coal mine, a wind farm, a hydro power dam. They visit ranches and national parks and a proposed copper mine at the headwaters of a cherished wilderness river. They bike along oil refinery pipelines and high voltage transmissions lines and meet with energy developers and environmental advocates. They ride into the wind and under a prairie sun. On any given year, they see and feel evidence of a changing climate, including, in the last two years: extreme heat, drought and its impacts on ranchers and rural communities, floods, and the impacts extreme weather events have on towns supported by outdoor recreation and tourism.

Experiential teaching challenges students to synthesize information they take in from reading and lectures with knowledge they derive from conversations and observations along the way. Structured blog posts, call-to-action letters and substantial social media posts require them to refine the lessons learned into engaging anecdotes supported by science and their own experience.

Morris, an ecologist and outdoor educator, has taught Cycle the Rockies many times since he helped develop the course more than a decade ago. He and White, a journalist and journalism professor, have taught the course together the past two years. This talk will consider their observations about the efficacy of field teaching for communicating climate science and policy to college students.

Bios:

Dave Morris has been instructing and administering field-based university courses since 2001. His teaching has centered on the U.S. Northern Rockies with the Wild Rockies Field Institute and the University of Montana. He has also led educational adventures in Canada, Latin America, the Himalayas, New Zealand and Africa. Climate and energy issues have become central to his teaching on all courses, and Dave is always seeking new ways to engage students through experiential learning. 

Nadia White is an associate professor of Journalism at the University of Montana and director of the master’s program in Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism there. Montana Journalism teaches using a “learn by doing” model that lends itself nicely to teaching and learning in the field. She has co-led courses at the Wild Rockies Field Institute with Dave Morris and led experiential courses in terrain as rugged as the federal criminal court system and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and surrounding countryside.

Please join the CMC for their monthly meeting. Join by Google Meet or phone: meet.google.com/geb-ejro-wqm or (‪US)‪+1 605-432-8282 PIN: ‪792 879 230#

Resolving The Complex Chemistry of Combustion

Prof. Nicole Labbe,
CU Mechanical Engineering

"High temperature gas reacting systems are among the most complex chemical kinetics systems to model. For example, a prototypical gas phase reacting system is combustion, where fuels can undergo tens of thousands of unique competing reactions via thousands of unique chemical species. Further complicating the chemistry, these systems can be highly pressure dependent, and even modest pressure fluctuations can drastically change both reaction rate and species distributions. With such large combinatorial possibilities for reactions and product species, theory alone is often unable to fully resolve the chemical mechanism due to computational limitations. Furthermore, the breadth of reactions and species present limits the ability of experiments to fully resolve the chemistry of may gas phase reacting systems. However, through careful combination of both theoretical and experimental techniques, at least the most critical reactions can often be revealed for accurate chemical model development. In this work, we demonstrate how a combined approach using both semi-automated theoretical kinetics and gas phase speciation experiments was used to resolve several kinetics disputes in the literature due to unresolved kinetic mechanisms. First, we demonstrate how theoretical kinetics was the key to clearing up a discrepancy as to the source of methyl ketene in the pyrolysis of a biodiesel component, ethyl propanoate. Next, we show that a new tunable lab-scale VUV light source was able to experimentally prove a theoretically predicted keto-enol tautomerization for acetone for the first time. Finally, we explore how a combined experimental and theoretical approach resolved how the location of the double bond in methylcyclohexene dramatically changes the sooting propensity between each of the three possible isomers."

Unfortunately, November's event is being canceled due to the forecasted snowy weather. We want everyone to stay safe and hope to see you at the CIRES Seasonal Celebration on December 9 (and don’t forget to rsvp by Noon on November 28!! https://ciresevents.colorado.edu/seasonalcelebration2022/).

We will start up monthly Get-Togethers in the new year.

All CIRES Visiting Fellows and Post-docs are invited to the monthly CIRES Visiting Fellows and Post-docs Get-Together. This month we will meet on November 29 from 3 to 5 pm at the Rayback Collective. This will be a fun, social event and a great opportunity to meet new and friendly faces from CIRES. Please look for Christine Wiedinmyer, Associate Director for Science, and Jennifer Katzung at a table with a CIRES sign.