During the 2025 Joint VOCs Conference, AirUCI professor Donald Blake received a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to research on volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Congratulations, Don!
News
Here's the latest news from AirUCI — our events, our people, our science.
2025
Saturday, November 8, 2025
Monday, November 3, 2025
A recent paper published by AirUCI faculty member Claudia Czimczik and colleagues in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres has been profiled by multiple media outlets. The paper demonstrates that radiocarbon analyses of turfgrasses may be used to estimate fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions around cities - a challenging measurement to make, and one that is important for cities working to decrease their greenhouse gas emissions. Read the articles here, here, and here.
Thursday, October 30, 2025
AirUCI researchers were among the awardees of the UC Irvine Climate Collaboration's inaugural team project grants. AirUCI professors Jim Smith, Celia Faiola, and Alex Guenther have partnered together with the South Coast Air Quality Management District to study, "how desert plants capture carbon, use water, and emit gases under heat stress." In addition, AirUCI professor James Randerson has received grants in partnership with two different research teams to develop fire risk maps and to better understand wildfire behavior. Read the article.
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
AirUCI faculty member Jack Brouwer was quoted in an article in the Los Angeles Times about LADWP's plan to shift its largest gas power plant to hydrogen. "It's a good plan. The Scattergood facility and some of the other coastal plants are part of the required infrastructure to enable LA 100 to become completely decarbonized and depolluted. It's not even possible to do this without something there," says Brouwer. Read the article.
Friday, October 24, 2025
AirUCI faculty member Scott Samuelsen was quoted in an article in The Wall Street Journal about the potential of bidirectional electric vehicle chargers to transform the power grid. The article states, "'Real-world deployment of bidirectional charging is essential for gathering the data, and the technical and customer adaptation insights needed to scale V2H deployment across the grid,' said Prof. Scott Samuelsen, project director and founding director of the UCI Advanced Power and Energy Program." Read the article.
Friday, October 17, 2025
The community-university partnership ¡Plo-NO! Santa Ana! (Lead-Free Santa Ana!), co-led by AirUCI professor Jun Wu, was honored by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation as a 2025 Exemplary Project through its Community Engagement Scholarship Awards program. The award recognizes "four-year public universities that have made exemplary strides to become more closely and productively engaged with communities through their teaching/learning, discovery, and service activities." ¡Plo-NO! Santa Ana! "engaged youth, residents, and students in systematically collecting over 1,500 soil samples across the City of Santa Ana, mapping soil lead concentrations in each Census tract, investigating potential sources of contamination, and organizing information sessions and advocacy campaigns to press for lead remediation." Read the article.
Thursday, October 16, 2025
AirUCI professor Celia Faiola has won the American Association for Aerosol Research's prestigious Kenneth T. Whitby Award, given for "outstanding technical contributions to aerosol science and technology by a young scientist. The purpose of the award is to encourage continued work in the field and ongoing support of such endeavors." Congratulations, Celia!
Friday, October 10, 2025
The AAAR Student Chapter at UCI held online elections for its 2025-26 Executive Board from September 30-October 3. The results are in, and its newly-elected officers are: Jackson Ryan, President; Colleen Miller, Treasurer; Berenice Rojas, Professional Development Chair; Connor Seto, Social Events Chair; Dhivya Manickam, Undergraduate Liaison; Sage Lauper-Cook, Secretary. Congratulations to all of the new board members!
Friday, October 10, 2025
Donald Blake, AirUCI faculty member, was quoted extensively in a recent article in The Orange County Register. The article discusses the two Nobel Prizes that UCI faculty received in 1995, including one awarded to three scientists including UCI Professor Sherwood Rowland, "for their work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone." Blake worked closely with Rowland for many years. Read the article.
Thursday, October 9, 2025
A team led by AirUCI professor Jun Wu has been awarded a grant from the National Institute of Enviornmental Health Sciences. Wu says, "Our goal is to better understand how environmental conditions may contribute to mental health challenges for parents and children. By identifying risks and vulnerable periods, we can provide insights that help families and communities build resilience." Read the article.
