General Lecture

"From Air Pollution to Global Climate Change: What Have We Learned from the Past Thousand Years?"

Thursday, May 1, 2003
7:30 p.m., PS H-150

Air pollution has been recognized for almost a thousand years, yet controversy continues regarding its sources, impacts and controls. In this talk, what was known about this issue starting about 1200 a.d. through to the present will be discussed. This wide-ranging and long-term perspective provides the basis for insights about current and future air quality issues that are now known to affect humankind on local to global scales, and points the way towards possible solutions.

Technical Presentation

"Chemistry of Sea Salt from Local to Global Scales: An Integrated Approach Using Experiments, Molecular Dynamics Simulations and Airshed Modeling"

Friday, May 2, 2003
3:40 p.m., PS H-150

Atmospheric chemistry encompasses laboratory, field and modeling studies, and draws on all of the traditional areas of chemistry. A major goal of this field is a molecular level understanding of reactions in the atmosphere that will allow the development of accurate models used for interpreting field measurements of trace gases and particles, and for developing control strategies for air pollutants. I will describe the results of some of our laboratory studies of the reactions of gases with sea salt particles, both deliquesced (aqueous) and solid, that may have a significant impact on the chemistry of the marine boundary layer in both remote and polluted urban coastal areas. Integration of these experiments with collaborative efforts by colleagues carrying out molecular dynamics simulations, field measurements and airshed modeling allows a molecular level understanding of the chemistry to be developed and extrapolated to regional and global scales in the atmosphere.

Biographical Sketch of Barbara J. Finlayson-Pitts

Born April 1948 in Ottawa, Canada, the daughter of an aeronautical engineer and a secretary/homemaker, Professor Finlayson-Pitts was raised in Ottawa through high school. During that era, there were relatively few electives permitted in high school, and the ones she chose were Latin and home economics. An outstanding high school chemistry teacher fired her interest in chemistry and made it seem so logical and relevant that she continued on with chemistry as an undergraduate at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. (It was only many years later that the close similarity between the skills required for home economics and experimental chemistry became apparent to her). As an undergraduate at Trent University, she was again fortunate to have a number of outstanding faculty mentors, including several who had direct connections to atmospheric chemistry: R. E. March who had worked on the High Altitude Research Project in Canada and I. M. Chapman, nephew of Sir Sydney Chapman who first elucidated the mechanism of ozone formation in the stratosphere. A lecture in physical chemistry laboratory concerning the spectrosocopy of emissions from the aurora borealis sparked her interest in the applications of physical chemistry to the atmosphere, and led her to pursue this field in 1970 in graduate studies with J. N. Pitts Jr. at the University of California, Riverside UCR. This was about the time that the key role of the hydroxyl radical in atmospheric chemistry was first recognized, and the area of gas phase kinetics and mechanisms of reactions in the atmosphere was expanding rapidly. UCR was one of the major centers for such research, including the construction during that time of a state-of-the-art smog chamber for carrying out studies at ppm and ppb levels of reactants, and measurement of important atmospheric species in air using a variety of spectroscopic techniques. She graduated in 1973 with a Ph.D. in Chemistry, carried out a year of postdoctoral research at UCR and then joined the faculty at California State University, Fullerton, a primarily undergraduate institution. In 1994 she joined the faculty at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) as a Professor of Chemistry. Her current research efforts focus on understanding reactions at the air-water interface and in thin water films found on surfaces when water vapor is present. This chemistry involves both the reactions of sea salt particles as well as oxides of nitrogen. She serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including The Journal of Physical Chemistry, Atmospheric Enviroment, and International Journal of Physical Chemistry and is on the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science. She serves on the NASA Panel for Data Evaluation and the California Air Resources Board Research Screening Committee. She is the author or co-author of approximately 100 papers in the peer-reviewed literature, and two books on atmospheric chemistry co-authored with J. N. Pitts Jr., “Atmospheric Chemistry: Fundamentals and Experimental Techniques” (Wiley, 1986) and “Chemistry of the Upper and Lower Atmosphere: Theory, Experiments and Applications” (Academic Press, 2000). Professor Finlayson-Pitts is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Geophysical Union. She is a recipient of the American Chemical Society Orange County Section’s “Service Through Chemistry” Award, as well as UCI awards for undergraduate and graduate education: the School of Physical Sciences Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education, and the Graduate Voice Faculty Mentor Award.