Atmospheric Chemistry Program Seminar

Understanding aerosols for pollution, climate change, and disease transmission
Jose-Luis Jimenez,
ANYL Faculty
"Our group’s research focuses on understanding the sources, properties, transformations, and sinks of aerosols (and of the gases that interact with them), which have major effects on human health and climate. In this talk I will briefly present results from different projects over the last year, especially those most relevant to first year graduate student opportunities. I will introduce our aircraft research program, including results from the recent NASA/NOAA FIREX-AQ wildfire smoke study, where we obtained near-molecular level aerosol speciation data at 1 second time resolution. I will discuss our indoor air research, and hopefully convince you that you should never use black conductive tubing except for non-volatile aerosols. I will also describe the importance of aerosols for disease transmission, a topic in which I have been working with many of the world leaders since March 2020. I will summarize the reasons why I think COVID-19 transmission is driven by aerosols, with a smaller fraction of surface transmission, and with a minor contribution of ballistic “WHO” droplets from coughing and sneezing. I will present some ideas about how to protect ourselves better from COVID-19 in the coming months and from other respiratory diseases in the future.
For people interested in COVID-19 aerosol transmission, you can find some selected resources linked here: https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1298246684539940866 and a draft summary of the evidence here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11rY9tQtkFaV_M4N-hf5qp1_Xtuw8JYb4... "
This seminar is remote only. Please contact Anne for the link to access the session.