Prof Westervelt and Garima Raheja were honored with Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 2024-2025 awards. Raheja received the 2024 Devon T Wade mentorship, service, and advocacy award, for her outstanding efforts in these areas. More details on Garima's award are available here: https://www.gsas.columbia.edu/news/2024-devon-t-wade-mentorship-service-and-advocacy-award-winner-garima-raheja
Prof. Westervelt received the 2025 Faculty Mentoring award, in recognition of his mentorship of GSAS PhD students. More info here: https://www.gsas.columbia.edu/content/gsas-alumni-awards
Congratulations to Garima and Prof. Westervelt!
Salomé Dormoy, a master's student in the climate school working with the Westervelt group as a research intern, presented her project today at the Climate School's annual research showcase. Her work this year is titled " Quantification of Disproportionate Burdens of Ambient PM2.5 exposure due to historial redlining in New York City." Salomé was co-advised by senior PhD student Garima Raheja.
Congrats Salomé!
Congratulations to Joe Adabouk Amooli who passed his PhD qualifying exam this Wednesday! His paper is titled "An uncertain future for the climate and health impacts of anthropogenic aerosols in Africa" is also in review in ACP: https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2025/egusphere-2025-948/
Joe faced some tough questions from the committee but handled it very well! Great work!
Garima Raheja, 5th year PhD in the group, was honored recently with the 2025 Inflection Award. The award honors the 30 top climate researchers in the world. What a tremendous honor! Congratulations, Garima. More here: https://inflectionaward.com/
Prof. Westervelt had the pleasure of speaking to both the New York Times, Wired magazine, and AGU's Eos recently to discuss the discontinuation of the US embassy air quality measurement dataset. Read more here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/climate/state-department-air-monitoring-embassies.html
https://www.wired.com/story/air-monitoring-beijing-state-department-halted/
https://eos.org/research-and-developments/404-air-quality-data-from-u-s-embassies-removed
This week prof. Westervelt is in Nairobi for NBO-CHEM, a new field campaign to measure aerosol composition in Nairobi. See more here https://aerosol.ldeo.columbia.edu/content/nbo-chem
We had a huge successful showing at AGU 2024 in Washington DC this year! Everyone had a talk or a poster (in some cases several posters!) and had a lot of visitors at their talks and posters. We forgot to take a photo at group dinner, but some photos are below. A list of presentations from group members can be found here.
Prof. Westervelt travled to Accra, Ghana this week for two purposes: 1) checking in on field work with EPA Ghana and visiting the Afri-SET site and 2) participating in the KNUST West Africa Air Quality program. Thanks to the hosts and organizers for facilitating the trip! Some photos below.
We are welcoming several new group members to the Westervelt aerosol group:
1. Dr. Abhishek Anand joins as a postdoctoral research scientist. He completed his PhD in August with Prof. Albert Presto from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Anand will work on the new Clean Air Fund project on satellite-derived estimates of PM2.5 in Africa. His website is here.
2. Gopikrishan Gopalakrishna joins us as a Fulbright fellow from IIT-Kharagpur, India. He is a 3rd year PhD student. He is working on ozone pollution globally and in India using GEOS-Chem. More information here.
3. Three undergraduate researchers have joined us for the academic year. Ollie McDonald is a senior undergraduate at Barnard and will work with Prof. Westervelt on her senior thesis on air quality data from shipping emissions. Jordan Hill is a senior undergraduate at Columbia and will work on air quality and public health in Kinshasa, also for her senior thesis. Kade Jimenez is a senior in engineering at Columbia and is working on the rooftop monitoring site data analysis project.
Welcome to the new team members!
LDEO Open House was held on October 19, 2024. Several thousand community members visited Lamont to experience great hands on science, attend public lectures, and explore the beautiful campus. Our group was out in force for this event! We had two tables in the Oceanography Tent on air quality monitoring, and Prof. Westervelt gave a public lecture, which can be viewed on recording here. Photos from the event below!
Several group members, including Garima Raheja, Dan Westervelt, and Trevor Durning, were in Bengaluru, India, this week for the India Clean Air Summit 2024, which this year included a side meeting of CAMS-Net, the Clean Air Monitoring and Solutions Network, an NSF project led out of the Westervelt group at LDEO/CU.
Details including presentations, agendas, and photos can be found on the event website, here: https://cstep.in/event-details.php?id=2775
Thanks to CSTEP for being a great host!
We are having a very busy summer!
We welcomed two undergraduate research interns as part of the LDEO REU program. Andrea Belvis-Aquino, from University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez, is working on use of optical particle counters to diagnose dust transport events in the Caribbean, with an emphasis on air quality impacts in Puerto Rico. Sophia Roberts, from Barnard College, joins the group to work on air quality exposure racial and social disparities in New York City.
We also had an exciting opportunity to visit and install a multipollutant air monitor on the LDEO Research Vessel Marcus G Langseth! The team installed a SENSIT RAMP monitor which includes sensors for particulate matter, SO2, O3, CO, and CO2! The data will stream continuously as the Langseth continues her mission sailing around the world.
Finally, we have established a sensor intercomparison site on the rooftop of LDEO Oceanography building! Anchored by an FEM GRIMM ED180 PM monitor, we have colocated ~10 different commercially available and custom-built sensor systems. A research study will be conducted using this data.
Mr. Tedy Mwendwa Mutisya joins us for 1.5 months for a short research stay from his home university at Kenyatta University. Together with Dr. Godwin Opinde, who visited in May 2024, he is a key collaborator for our work in Kenya. During Tedy's stay he will be working on developing new air sensors in the lab and instrumenting our new rooftop monitoring site at LDEO.
The Westervelt group has a major presence at Air Sensors International Conference 2024 meeting in Riverside, CA.
Our PI was a plenary keynote speaker on Thursday, on the topic "Key Research Challenges for Realizing the Benefit of Sensors". In this talk, he laid out a vision for emerging research use cases for sensors: satellite data fusion, source apportionment, and streamlined correction models. He also gave a tutorial presentation on day 1and two other presentations during the week.
Also attending was 4th year PhD student Garima Raheja, who presented her work on globally applicable correction models for air sensors.
Dr. Godwin Opinde, from Kenyatta University, attended as well as a key collaborator of the Westervelt aerosol group. He delivered a keynote talk on community research aspects of air sensor projects.
Photos below!
This week and next, Prof. Westervelt, Dr. Yanda Zhang, and PhD student Joe Amooli are in Oslo, Norway for the Heterogenous Climate Forcing (HETCLIF) project! Dr. Zhang is having an extended stay at the Center for Advanced Study in Oslo where he's working on regional aerosol emissions impacts on the Arctic. Both Dr. Zhang and Joe are also participating in the HETCLIF early career workshop, which has included PhD students and postdocs from University of Reading (UK), University of California Riverside, University of Texas, and CICERO (Climate Research Center Norway). Some highlights include a hackathon in which ECRs have identified aerosol induced extreme events in RAMIP simulations, and, on the lighter side, a bowling outing (pictured below).
Prof. Westervelt was recently appointed as an affiliate professor at Université Mohammed VI Polytechnic (UM6P) in Benguerir, Morocco. His group is affiliated with the African Research Center on Air Quality and Climate, led by his colleague Professor Wahid Mellouki. UM6P is a flagship research university on the African continent. Our group will contribute work on air sensors and chemical transport modeling. Student positions may be available both through UM6P or Columbia. Please contact Prof. Westervelt for more info.
Prof. Westervelt is in Baltimore for a few days for the annual AMS meeting. He will deliver two presentations:
He is also co-chairing a session on wildfire air quality, and air sensors for environmental justice.
For the month of November, Prof. Westervelt will be a visiting research fellow at the Norwegian Academy of Sciences' Center for Advanced Study as part of the Heterogeneous Climate Forcing (HETCLIF) project. He is hosted by Drs. Marianne Lund and Bjørn Samset, of CICERO. The goal of the visit will be to forge collaborations on regional aerosol climate forcing and bring new opportunities for group members to conduct research in collaboration with HETCLIF team members.
Details can be found here: https://cas-nor.no/project/heterogeneous-climate-forcing-hetclif
The whole group visited the NYSDEC Air Monitoring site in Queens, NYC. We were hosted by Santosh Mahat and Eric, site engineers for air quality. We have been working with this site since 2019, and returned to co-locate some additional air quality sensors. We also got a tour of their great equipment at both the NCore site and the Near Roadway site!
Following the recent wildfire smoke event in New York City, which brought unprecedented levels of air pollution to the NYC area, several group members were featured on local and national news. Links and photos below!
Garima Raheja featured on local WABC news and City Limits:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucivtO4qNtU
https://citylimits.org/2023/06/08/amid-air-quality-crisis-officials-urge-people-indoors-what-about-street-homeless-new-yorkers/
Dan Westervelt was on CNN, NY Times, and several other outlets.
https://x.com/columbiaclimate/status/1666804836992704514?s=20
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-07/smoky-blanket-over-us-northeast-raises-asthma-heart-concerns
https://www.curbed.com/2023/06/nyc-air-quality-canada-wildfires-haze.html
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/07/us/canada-wildfires-air-quality-smoke
Group leader Prof. Dan Westervelt was promoted to Lamont Associate Research Professor, effective July 1, 2023. Congratulations Dan!
In recent weeks, PhD students Garima Raheja and Benjamin Yang both passed important milestones in their PhD careers!
Ben passed his qualifying exam in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University.
Garima successfully presented her dissertation proposal in March.
Congratulations, Garima and Ben!
The whole group made the long journey to Kigali, RW, from March 7-10, for the CAMS-Net + AfriqAir annual meeting. The Westervelt group was one of the meeting organizers and are the home to the NSF-funded CAMS-Net project. Several great presentations, posters, panel discussions, and tutorials from all group members. Plus it was the first time some of our group members had met our African collaborators in person. Photos from the event are here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/143275917@N03/albums/72177720306742264
Former group postdoctoral research scientist Dr. Zhonghua Zheng (now at Manchester UK) published a paper recently on the use of auto machine learning (AutoML) for atmospheric chemistry research using publicly available satellite data. This paper was featured as an EOS Editor's highlight: "Unleashing the Power of AutoML for Atmospheric Research". Link below:
https://eos.org/editor-highlights/unleashing-the-power-of-automl-for-atmospheric-research