About AirUCI
Who We Are
We're a research team based at the University of California, Irvine and our focus is to probe a new type of chemistry that occurs in the atmosphere at the interface between air and water.
Funded by the National Science Foundation (Divisions of Chemistry and Atmospheric Sciences) and headed by Professor Barbara J. Finlayson-Pitts, we began in August 2002 as a Collaborative Research in Chemistry (CRC) group. In September 2004 we became an Environmental Molecular Sciences Institute (EMSI).
This EMSI represents a partnership between six faculty at UCI and international researchers from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, and the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, together with researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at Pacific Northwest National Lab.
What We Do
Chemical reactions that play key roles in the formation of smog, acid
rain, and in global climate change are known to occur between gases, as
well as inside liquid droplets that are present in the atmosphere in the
form of airborne particles, fogs, and clouds.
Only recently has it been apparent that chemical reactions also occur right at the interface between air and these atmospheric droplets. Both the speed with which these interface reactions occur and the manner in which they take place may be quite different from reactions in either the gas or liquid.
AirUCI integrates
- research
- education
- outreach to 7-12 schools, community colleges, and the public
in the context of probing this unique interfacial chemistry. The scientific team combines theory, experiments, and computer modeling of air quality to provide new insights into how this chemistry at interfaces impacts the atmosphere in regions from polluted to remote.
Undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting community college faculty work with AirUCI to carry out the research.
Along with providing these unique graduate student and postdoctoral training opportunities, AirUCI provides continuing professional training and curricular support in both fundamental chemistry and atmospheric sciences to regional high school and middle school science teachers.
In addition, we have developed active outreach efforts to community college faculty, to primarily undergraduate institutions, and to the community at large.
- Learn more about our research projects.
- See details about our award-winning team.
- Find out about our outreach opportunities.