My name is Joost de Gouw. I am originally Dutch, and I am a professor in CIRES, and also a fellow of CIRES. I first joined CIRES in 2001, and for the last seven years I’ve been a professor with my own research group in the institute. 

So what I do is the science of air pollution, you might say. So our cities still have air pollution. It's gotten much better over the years, but we still have air pollution in our cities, and what I do is study where the pollution comes from. What are the sources that are responsible for it? How have they changed over time, and importantly, what can we do to improve things?  

My group in CIRES has approximately six students right now, and one research scientist. And what we do is we study the chemistry of air, and we do that in different ways. We go out to different locations. I measure air pollutants there. We were in Denver last year. We've made measurements for moving vehicles. Also, we can do some laboratory work where we really mimic the chemistry of the atmosphere in a big chamber in CIRES, and then we can really look at processes in isolation. So the combination is really powerful. 

Over the past few years, we've been really active in researching the aftermath of the Marshall Fire. We went in and made a lot of measurements after the Marshall Fire, and those have now been published. What we found was, yes, there was an effect of lingering smoke on people's environments, on their health, but with time, those went away, and so that provides some reassurance to people in L.A., for instance. Rright now that are dealing with a very similar situation. 

I'm doing research at a university, which means that the research really is done by graduate students who are studying for their PhDs. The research and their education go hand in hand, really, and my role is to mentor them in that process. My other hat is as a teacher. I teach courses, and that is both to graduate students to provide them the knowledge that they need in their research, but it's also to undergraduate students.   

The things that are being threatened right now are really threefold: first of all, the research itself is not advancing as it has been. The second thing is, the education of our students is also being threatened. Of all the research dollars that I get, 80% of that goes through student salaries, and if I don't get that, I cannot offer projects to students, and they won't come.

And then finally, when you do the type of science that we do, we need state-of-the-art instruments. We develop some of them ourselves, and a lot of those find applications in industry, in fields that go far beyond what we do. And then what you see is 10, 20 years later, those same techniques are being used in industry for completely different reasons, and so that that spin-off to industry is really important as well, and is also something that's threatened by all of this. 

What I really like about CIRES is the collaborative nature of our research. Everybody adds a piece of the puzzle, and together, you can make a really, really complicated puzzle. By yourself, you would never be able to do that. I think what's important about the research at CIRES is it's motivated by real-world problems: climate change, air pollution, sea level rise, these are real issues that society has to deal with in the future. And good science is just essential. 

Music courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions:

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