Environmental Engineering Special Seminar - Rodney Weber (04.10.2024) - EPFL

Environmental Engineering Special Seminar - Rodney Weber (04.10.2024)

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Environmental Engineering Special Seminar - October 4, 2024.

Speakers: Prof. Rodney Weber, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Title: Assessing PM2.5 Air Pollution’s Adverse Health Effects with Particle Oxidative Potential: Is Oxidative Potential Useful?

Inhalation of fine aerosol particles, known as PM2.5, leads to adverse health outcomes. Regulations to protect health are based on PM2.5 mass concentration. In the ambient atmosphere PM2.5 is composed of a myriad of chemical species due to emissions from many sources and subsequent atmospheric processing that further alters particle composition. It is known that this results in a wide range in toxicities for individual chemical species within PM2.5, suggesting that PM2.5 mass concentration may not be the optimal metric to assess potential adverse effects or to design strategies to reduce health impacts on exposed populations. Measures of PM2.5 oxidative potential (OP) have been proposed as a more physiologically relevant parameter to assess particle adverse health effects. In the past 10 years or so many OP assays have been developed and characterized their responses to particle chemical species. In this talk I will summarize some of the studies I have been involved in that investigated links to adverse health and associations to OP vs PM2.5 mass, and discuss some results from measurements in Fairbanks, Alaska, that shows the utility of OP for assessing outdoor and indoor air quality.

Short bio: Rodney Weber is a Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry at School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA, USA. Professor Weber’s research broadly encompasses the formation, evolution and radiative and health impacts of atmospheric aerosols through the combination of field and laboratory observations and theory, often with instrumentation and techniques that is developed in his group. Throughout his career, Professor Weber has made seminal contributions on the topics of New Particle Formation, Secondary Organic Aerosol Formation, Aerosol and Human Health Effects, Fine Particle Acidity and Aerosol Brown Carbon. He is the inventor of the Particle-Into-Liquid Sampler (PILS) and is a Highly Cited Researcher in the field of Geosciences, authoring/co-authoring close to 300 refereed journal publications that are cited more than 42000 times and with an h-index of 117 (Google Scholar). His distinctions include the Kenneth T. Whitby Award from the American Association for Aerosol Research, the Ascent Award from the Atmospheric Sciences Section of the American Geophysical Union, and a Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences Faculty Mentor Award.

More Info: https://memento.epfl.ch/event/special-eess-talk-on-assessing-pm25-air-pollutio-2/

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Environmental Engineering Special Seminar - Rodney Weber (04.10.2024)

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