Here's the latest news from AirUCI — our events, our people, our science.
AirUCI faculty Don Blake is the recipient of a UCI Distinguished Alumnus Award from the UCI Alumni Association. The award "recognizes an alumnus who has achieved great professional prominence in their field and is engaged in the community, furthering the goals of UCI and/or the UCI Alumni Association." Don will be recognized at a future Lauds and Laurels Ceremony, but in the meantime we congratulate him on this well-deserved honor!
AirUCI faculty Donald Dabdub has been named Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor of the Year! This honor, based on a student vote, recognizes his excellent reputation among students and celebrates his documented track record of student mentorship, guidance and care. As an experienced teacher respected by students and faculty alike, Professor Dabdub offers some of his top tips for adjusting to the remote teaching environment. Congratulations, Donald!
AirUCI faculty Steve Davis and Jack Brouwer are serving on the executive board of UCI's Solutions That Scale, a new interdisciplinary initiative among the schools of Physical Sciences, Engineering, ICS, and Social Ecology that aims to discover, translate, and enable scalable, data-driven solutions to the global problems of climate change and environmental degradation. The initiative brings together scientists and academics, policy makers, business leaders, and global citizens to identify and accelerate scalable solutions in the areas of energy, environmental management, and societal adaptation to our changing environment.
On Earth Day 2020, the United Nations launched a new environmental education program for the world’s 1.5 billion youth who are confined to their homes due to COVID-19. Earth School — sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme and TED-Ed and supported by global organizations such as UNESCO, the National Geographic Society, and the World Wildlife Fund — include teaching modules developed and delivered by faculty from three UCI schools, including AirUCI faculty Steve Davis.
Along with Steve, UCI faculty involved in crafting the curricula include Bill Tomlinson, professor of informatics and Richard Matthew, professor of urban planning & public policy and faculty director of UCI’s Blum Center for Poverty Alleviation. UCI’s involvement in Earth School dates back several months according to James Bullock, dean of the School of Physical Sciences. “An interdisciplinary team of faculty had been holding regular Friday meetings to build on a sustainability project we call Solutions That Scale,” he said. “When we learned of this U.N. program to help kids in coronavirus lockdown learn about climate and the environment, we quickly saw ways to use concepts and content we had already created to contribute to learning modules." The modules help kids learn about Earth’s natural resources, sustainable design, and what they can do to protect nature. Read about Earth School
UC Irvine's Department of Earth System Science was the first in the country established to study climate change and is still among the best in the world. As of today, in the department's division of Atmospheric Chemistry, four of the five featured research groups are led by AirUCI faculty. Professors Alex Guenther, Eric Saltzman, Saewung Kim, and Michael Prather are working in the ESS department to further understanding of the atmosphere's role in planetary systems as diverse as the oceans, the rainforests, and climate — in fact, on the atmosphere itself and the entire biosphere.
AirUCI faculty Jim Smith is an aerosol expert who studies how things like dust and water droplets behave in the air, and now he has taken on medical masks and their construction in this time of the coronavirus. With masks in such short supply that people are sewing their own, and with do-it-yourself mask-making videos emerging online, Jim has assembled a team of UCI researchers studying the best way to make these masks. They’ve already discovered that “things like bandanas – a common item people might use as a mask – are only effective at stopping the kinds of large droplets emitted when someone sneezes,” Jim says. “Every day, I open up the news and I see another story about masks, about homemade masks, and about filtration in general, and I see a lot of misinformation about it,” he says.
They are utilizing the head of a medical "breathing" mannequin delivered by co-investigator Mike Kleinman, also an AirUCI faculty, to test everyday household fabrics such as furnace filters, bedsheets, pillowcases, and bandanas after fitting a breathing tube into the mannequin’s throat. The team then injects particles into the tube and measures the efficiency with which each material filters them. So far, they’ve tested more than 50 kinds of fabric.
Jim says, “Our best luck has actually been using a furnace filter made of nonwoven polypropylene that I pulled out of my garage and cut up.” He cautions that not all fabrics found around the house are good options for a face mask. Some materials, including furnace filters made of Fiberglas, can send fibers into a person’s lungs. “We want people to understand what is effective and what is not,” Smith says. “We feel that in the next week we’ll have a design available.”
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AirUCI faculty Doug Tobias, chair of UCI's Chemistry Department, is lending his expertise in molecular modeling to a new research endeavor to blunt effects of the COVID-19 virus. Prof. Rachel Martin is leading the team, comprised of several Chemistry faculty, who are applying their knowledge of cysteine proteases (proteins and enzymes) to come up with inhibitor strategies to block those enzymes in this new coronavirus.
Rachel explains that viruses don’t have many genes, so they need to be very efficient with their resources; that’s why they highjack mammalian cells to do their bidding. A common viral strategy is to express all of their proteins at once in a long string, then a molecule called a protease cuts up the chain so the proteins can perform various functions – which ultimately sicken the host mammal. “While it may not completely stop the virus like a vaccine could, blocking this action of the protease enzyme could be a step toward knocking the virus down and preventing it from causing such dire illnesses,” Martin says.
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AirUCI faculty Annmarie Carlton has released a public service announcement relating to COVID-19. The nine-minute video does an excellent job of explaining the physics and mechanics of the virus' transmission and what blocks it. Highly recommended for professionals and the public alike! View the presentation
AirUCI faculty Steve Davis is quoted in a March 24th article in Newsweek Magazine on the effects of the response to the COVID virus on CO2 emissions worldwide. "In recent years, we've emitted close to 500 tons of CO2 for every million dollars of global GDP, " says Steve. "If this ratio holds, a decline in world GDP can be expected to cause a proportional decrease in global CO2 emissions." Read the article
In a March 19th article in Mother Jones, AirUCI faculty Annmarie Carlton is cited among those striving to fight the COVID virus or ease its effects. In working to create online instruction for her classes, she built a simplified model using Google Trends and air quality data that she thinks is able to predict the spread of the disease in places where there are no tests at all. She describes being torn between refining this model and continuing to create online content for her classes so her students can make their own models one day. Read the article
