Professor Scott Samuelsen, an AirUCI faculty member, was quoted in an article in the Los Angeles Times. The article explores how the families still living in the portion of the Palos Verdes peninsula that has been cut off from the electrical grid and from natural gas are getting by. The article states, "I've not heard of a situation that's being experienced in Palos Verdes," said Scott Samuelsen, the founding director of the Advanced Power and Energy Program at UC Irvine. He compared the circumstances with those after a natural disaster, such as a hurricane that damages power lines or a major wildfire that destroys key transmission lines. But in those cases, he said utilities typically work nonstop to restore connectivity and often provide short-term backup power." Read the article.
News
Here's the latest news from AirUCI — our events, our people, our science.
2025
The data analytics firm Clarivate published its annual list of the most highly cited researchers in the world. Within its list, only 227 scientists were recognized as highly cited in more than one field, and AirUCI faculty member James T. Randerson was among them, for both the Geosciences and the Environment and Ecology categories. Congratulations, James! Read more here.
During the 2025 Joint VOCs Conference, AirUCI professor Donald Blake received a lifetime achievement award "for his lifelong contributions to global VOCs research." Congratulations, Don!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Audrey Miles, an AirUCI graduate student in Sarah Finkeldei's research group, was recently part of the Nuclear Engineering Student Delegation in Washington, D.C. She described her experience in being part of the program, which gives students the opportunity "to discuss the issues facing nuclear energy, policy, education, and research with key policymakers." Read the article.
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.
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!
