Institute studying pollution, warming

Researchers will study how humans affect nature.

Irvine World News

December 2, 2004

UC Irvine has been awarded $7.5 million over five years from the National Science Foundation to establish an Environmental Molecular Science Institute - one of only seven currently funded institutes dedicated to understanding at the molecular level how human activity and nature contribute to global environmental problems.

The UCI institute will focus on understanding how chemical reactions occur at the boundary between air and liquid droplets in the atmosphere (such as fog, humidity and rain, as well as dew on buildings and other surfaces), affecting atmospheric pollution and climate change.

"Our mission is to uncover how molecules in the environment are interacting and potentially influencing everything from the amount of air pollution in Los Angeles to climate change," said Barbara Finlayson-Pitts, principal investigator of the award, director of the new institute and professor of chemistry.

"Our research area is exciting as only recently have scientists understood that chemical reactions occurring at the boundary between air and liquid water in the atmosphere may influence air quality in a number of previously unrecognized ways."

Scientists at the institute will use theory, experiments and computer modeling of air quality to gain new understanding into how liquid droplets play roles in the formation of smog and acid rain, and in global climate change.

These reactions occur across a range of scales in both time and space, in the troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere, and their studies will capture this range.