AirUCI PI Jack Brouwer has served as faculty adviser for the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems in Team Orange’s entry in the seventh bi-annual national Solar Decathlon, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy. Partner schools UCI, Irvine Valley College, Chapman University, and Saddleback College form Orange County's entry, and the schools have been working for two years to design and build an innovative solar home, on view through October 18, 2015.
In a quote from the Orange County Register, Jack said, “I certainly hope this house has outreach potential for inspiring our students to pursue this technology in the future and those in the general public to realize that, first of all, it can be beautiful. Secondly, it can be energy efficient, and third, it can be sustainable for them to use for centuries to come. There’s no other energy conversion for how we should live that can claim that.” Read the article
News
Here's the latest news from AirUCI — our events, our people, our science.
2015
On October 9, 2015, AirUCI will again host high school students from the Lennox Academy who will tour our labs and learn about our research projects. Their 2014 tour was such a success that a new crop of students wanted to visit us! View the schedule
Dr. Lisa Wingen, AirUCI Project Scientist, is participating for the second year in an outreach effort as a "science coach" for a 5th grade teacher at Castille Elementary School in Mission Viejo, a program sponsored by the American Chemical Society. She will once again act as a resource and assistant in implementing science enrichment activities for the class.
AirUCI PI Sergey Nizkorodov has been named Co-Director of the AirUCI Institute. Along with Director Barbara Finlayson-Pitts, Sergey will oversee the many tasks required to keep our institute running smoothly. He has already provided leadership in many of our activities and events, and we look forward to his able guidance in many more areas.
Dr. Rufus Edwards, Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at UCI's School of Medicine, is now an AirUCI PI. His research focuses on the effects of air pollution on human health, including assessment of human exposures to household air pollution from solid fuel use and subsequent health effects; emissions from household combustion sources including greenhouse gases and particulate matter including black carbon; emissions from rural small scale industries. He is well know for development of innovative sampling and analysis techniques. Welcome, Rufus!
The Gordon Research Conference on Atmospheric Chemistry: Multiphase Processes: Observations and Fundamentals was held August 3-7, 2015 in Waterville Valley, New Hampshire. The final session of the conference was dedicated to the memory of AirUCI's Jim Pitts, a titan in the field of atmospheric chemistry, who passed away in June, 2014. Barbara Finlayson-Pitts, our director as well as research partner and wife of Jim, was attending the conference as a keynote speaker and was present for this rememberance of our dear colleague and friend.
AirUCI Director Barbara Finlayson-Pitts was the keynote speaker at the Gordon Research Conference on Atmospheric Chemistry: Multiphase Processes: Observations and Fundamentals which was held August 3-7, 2015 in Waterville Valley, New Hampshire. Her talk was entitled, "Particles, Pesticides and Politics". In addition, AirUCI PI Sergey Nizkorodov was an invited speaker at the conference, with a talk entitled, "The State of Knowledge of Condensed-Phase Photochemistry in Atmospheric Organic Aerosols". Former AirUCI collaborator Markus Ammann was also an invited speaker and former AirUCI postdoc Jennie Thomas was a discussion leader for the Halogens in the Troposphere session.
On Thursday, August 6th, AirUCI will host a group of Beckman Foundation scholars in a presentation of our research and a tour of our labs.
AirUCI PI Mike Dennin is often interviewed on TV for his expertise in Physics, Chemistry, and Earth Sciences. He's a regular on the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel, and other networks, and his course "Science from Superheroes to Global Warming" has become famous and is now offered on the online learning site, Coursera. Congratulations, Mike!
AirUCI welcomes two new facullty to our institute — Dr. Alex Guenther and Dr. James N. Smith. Dr. Guenther comes to us from PNNL in Richland, Washington and is the newest professor in UCI's Department of Earth System Sciences. Dr. Smith is joining us from NCAR at Boulder, Colorado and is taking a new position in UCI's Department of Chemistry. Welcome, Jim and Alex!
