Group News
2025
December
Four lab members will showcase our work at the 2025 AGU Fall Meeting:
- Wade, Wednesday, Downwind Air Quality Impacts and Fireline Exposure of Western U.S. Prescribed Fire Smoke
- Lu T., Wednesday, Fire-line Characterization of Prescribed Fire Emissions with Mobile Laboratory Observations
- Lixu, Thursday, Characterizing Emissions, Chemistry, and Health Impacts of Aged Biomass Burning Smoke in Wildland Urban Interface: A Missoula, Montana Case Study
- Wade, Thursday, Laboratory Characterization of Furanoids Measured by PTR-ToF-MS
- Emily, Friday, Comparing summertime VOC sources and chemistry in Salt Lake City, Utah and Fort Collins, Colorado: preliminary results from SLC-SOS 2024 and FROZÉ 2025 mobile laboratory deployments
September
Check out this nice report on Wade and Lu T.'s work on prescribed fire emissions: UM is Clearing the Air in the West.
July-August
Supervan in motion: Collaborating with our CSU colleagues, we are in Colorado this summer for the Front Range Ozone Experiment (FROZÉ) field campaign.
April
We have lots of great news about lab members to share this month:
- Joseph is on the news! From Exploration to Impact: UM Undergraduate Research Drives Student Success
- Emily won the UM's Bertha Morton Scholarship, "a most impressive achievement for it places you among the top five percent of the University’s graduate students in academic performance, research and creative activities."
- Lu T., Emily, and Joseph won various departmental scholarships for their outstanding performance, including the Shafizadeh and Jesse scholarships.
March
Check out the two cool news articles interviewing Dr. Wade Permar about his work in SMART Fires and Supervan:
2024
December
Three lab members will be attending the AGU Fall Meeting in Washington DC. If you will be there, please come and check out their presentations at:
- Emily, Monday morning, Comparing the importance of traffic and solvent use for VOC emissions in Salt Lake City, Utah: preliminary results from SLC-SOS mobile lab deployment in 2024 summer
- Lixu, Monday afternoon, Evaluating Ozone Photochemistry in Biomass Burning Plumes: Insights from Aircraft Campaign Data
- Damien, Tuesday afternoon, Emissions of Trace Gases and Particulate Matter During Real-World Operation of a Pellet Stove: Characterization and Assessment of Emissions Inventories
- Damien, Tuesday afternoon, Characterization of Volatile Organic Compounds and Aerosols from Shallow-Frying Chicken Tenderloins
- Lixu, Friday morning, Global emissions and chemistry of furanoids: 3-D model analysis and constraints from in-situ observations
October
Our SuperVan (Mobile Atmospheric Chemistry Lab, or MAC Lab) is ready for field deployment! Led by Wade and Lu T., the lab is sampling prescribed burns out of the Lubrecht Experimental Forest as part of the SMART FIRE project. We are on fire!
September
Lu presents at the FUNCHEM (Fire UNcertainty in CHemistry Emissions, and Modelling) workshop about our recent work in biomass burning.
August
Great timing that Emily's first paper based on our 2022 SLC data has just been published at JGR. Congrats Emily! Check it out here. Together with additional field data collected this summer by the mobile lab and 2025 by UWy King Air aircraft, they will help inform the air quality policy in SLC.
July
Lu T., Emily, Wade, and Lu are part of the Urban Summer Ozone Study (USOS) field campaign to study urban photochemistry and pollution sources in Salt Lake City. It is a joint effort with NOAA, Colorado State U, U of Wyoming, U of Utah, etc, and we are co-deploying several mobile laboratories, aircraft, and other ground fixed monitoring stations. Enjoy some field photos below.
June
Hu group gives five presentations at the 11th International GEOS-Chem Meeting in St. Louis.
May
Harvest season!
- Congrats Emily for winning an honorable mention of the NSF GRFP award!
- Congrats Joseph, Mercedes, and Emily for winning various departmental awards for their excellence in academics and research.
April
Congrats Joseph and Mercedes for giving their first conference presentations at the UM Conference on Undergraduate Research! And, Joseph won the Best Oral Presentation in Physical Sciences!
March
Wade and Emily present our work about urban VOC sources in SLC at the Science for Solutions meeting.
2023
December
Hu group gives 4 presentations at the AGU Fall Meeting this year. Hope to see you there.
- Lu Tan presents "A32B-06 Measuring New Volatile Chemical Product (VCP) Species by Proton-Transfer-Reaction Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry" on Wednesday
- Wade presents "A33L-2705 Assessing Formic and Acetic Acid Emissions, Chemistry, and Model Representation in Western U.S. Wildfire Smoke" on Wednesday
- Lu Hu presents "A42G-08 Known and unexplored reactive organic carbon in the Arctic atmosphere (Invited)" on Thursday
- Emily presents "A53Q-09 Summertime Sources of Volatile Organic Compounds and the Impact of Wildfires in Salt Lake City, Utah" on Friday
October
Wade's paper on missing organic acid sources is highlighted by NOAA.
Lixu and Damien present at the US EPA emission inventory conference in Seattle, WA.
August
Lixu's new publication is highlighted in the climate.gov!
Wade delivers the keynote at the Montana ACS summer meeting in Helena, MT!
June
Damien presents his work on indoor air pollutants in Helsinki, Finland.
The group gives five presentations at The 77th ACS Northwest Regional Meeting (NORM) in Bozeman, MT.
May
We will be part of the Montana's new NSF EPSCoR Track 1 project and will lead the field study of prescribed fire emissions and chemistry. Looking forward to the large collaborative project for the next 5 years!
Joseph has been awarded a summer research fellowship from Montana Space Grant Consortium and joins us as an undergraduate researcher. He will work on installing a weather and air quality station at our local science museum this summer!
April
Lixu is awarded the Departmental Shafizadeh Memorial Scholarship for wood chemistry. Damien receives the travel award from the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) to travel to the Air Pollution in the Arctic: Climate, Environment and Societies Open Science meeting in Helsinki, Finland in June. Congrats, Lixu and Damien!
March
Emily and Lu present our recent work at the Air Quality Science for Solution meeting in Salt Lake City.
February
Wade's paper about VOC emissions from wildfires was among the top cited articles 2021-2022 in JGR: Atmosphere. Congrats Wade!
2022
December
Hu Group leads five presentations at the AGU 2022 Fall Meeting in Chicago, including two invited talks:
- Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from fires: how many should we care about?
- Atmospheric chemistry of volatile organic compounds in high and mid-latitude urban areas impacted by residential wood burning
- Estimating Air Quality Impacts of Western US Wildfires Using A Continental Scale Chemical Transport Model
- Wintertime Sources and Sinks of Volatile Organic Compounds in Fairbanks, Alaska
August
Lixu and Damien participate in the SAMOZA field campaign in Salt Lake City to study summertime ozone formation.
Congrats Lu for winning the prestigious NSF CAREER Award for wildfire smoke research!
June
Lixu and Damien participate in the SCENTS-2 lab experiments to study the VCPs' role in SOA formation.
Group members Amy, Sree, Lixu, and Lu present at the 10th International GEOS-Chem Meeting (IGC10) in St. Louis, MO.
January
Vanessa and Damien are leading our group effort participating in the The Alaskan Layered Pollution and Chemical Analysis (ALPACA) field campaign to study the chemistry and emissions in Fairbanks, AK. Follow our group twitter for more update.
2021
December
It is AGU time! We have 3 group members showcasing in 5 presentations:
- Wade Permar presents on Wednesday PM on his work on OH reactivity in fire smoke
- Amy Christiansen presents on Monday (13:30 PM) on long term trend of global NOx emissions
- Amy will also present Tuesday (13:30 PM) on long term global tropospheric O3 trend:
- Vanessa Selimovic presents Monday (7 AM) on Arctic biogenic VOC emissions
- Vanessa's Wednesday (3 PM) presentation will be on How well can a global model represent regional smoke and assess continental-scale impacts of fires?
May
Wade's paper on VOC emissions from western US wildfires was just accepted! Amy and Vanessa were both invited to attend the 16th Atmospheric Chemistry Colloquium for Emerging Senior Scientists (ACCESS XVI)! Keri graduated with summa cum laude and two B.s. degrees! Just wow! Congrats, everyone! It's an honor to work with you all!
April
Lu gave an invited talk on our recent WE-CAN wildfire study at the Frontiers in Atmospheric Chemistry Seminar Series.
March
Congratulations to Damien Ketcherside on receiving an Honorable Mention in the National Science Foundation's 2021 Graduate Research Fellowship Program! Read more in the UM news release.
February
Wade won the Outstanding Student Presentation Award at the AGU Fall Meeting 2020. Congrats, Wade!
January
Sree presented preliminary results of the TEMPO project at the AMS meeting. Catie successfully defended her master degree. Congrats, Catie!
2020
Rest of 2020
The COVID pandemic has brought challenges for everyone. Well we don't want to just skip this year. The group gave 5 AGU Fall Meeting presentations. More importantly, we welcomed 3 amazing women scientists to the group this year! More exciting science to come:
- Dr. Amy Christiansen leads our effort on studying factors controlling the long term trend of global tropospheric ozone;
- Dr. Vanessa Selimovic leads our effort in examining sources of VOCs in the Arctic and in Missoula;
- Dr. Sree Chaliyakunnel takes the group's interests to space and leads our TEMPO project.
February
Congrats to Keri and Wade, who won INBRE Travel Award grants to attend national conferences! Keri will be presenting at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Bozeman, MT this March, and Wade will be presenting at the 3rd International Smoke Symposium in Raleigh, NC this April.
2019
December
NSF just funded our research to study the capability of a to-be-launched geostationary satellite, The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO), for monitoring VOC emissions from fire smoke! To learn more about TEMPO, here is the link.
October
Damien gives an oral presentation about the air toxins in Missoula at the 2019 NIH IDeA Western Regional Conference, Las Vegas, NV. This work is funded by the Montana INBRE.
September
NOAA just funded our research to study the long term trend of global tropospheric ozone! This project is in collaboration with the Mickley group at Harvard.
August
Wade, Damien, and Ahsan participate in the field campaign at Mt. Bachelor Observatory, jointly with our awesome collaborators at U Washington (Jaffe and Thornton groups) and UC Davis (Zhang group).
May-June
Catie leads the field deployment of our PTR-ToF-MS in the Arctic at Toolik Field Station in Alaska. We are there to study how the warming climate affects biogenic VOCs emitted from Arctic tundra, together with collaborators from the Helmig group of CU Boulder and the Millet group of U Minnesota. Looking forward to analyzing this unique dataset! Check out more field photos at our department Instagram and lab Twitter posts.
April
Emi presents at the UM Conference on Undergraduate Research on her laboratory burning experiments of fire retardant.
Wade, Catie, and Ahsan give updates on wildfire smoke analyses and present at the WE-CAN Workshop 2019 in Boulder, CO.
January
Three members of the HU group present at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) meeting in Phoenix, AZ.
- Wade: Characterization of Non-Methane Organic Gases in Wildfire Smoke by PTR-ToF-MS during the WE-CAN Field Campaign
- Catie: Constraining Emission and Chemistry of Formic and Acetic Acids from Fire Smoke with WE-CAN Field Observations
- Lu: Global simulation of tropospheric chemistry at 12.5 km resolution: the NASA GEOS-5 Earth System Model with GEOS-Chem chemistry
2018
September
We took 7 students from CHMY595 Atmospheric Chemistry class on a field trip to fly in the C-130 research aircraft and visit National Center for Atmospheric Research laboratories in Colorado. This educational flight and our research efforts on western wildfire smoke are reported by UM News. Other reports include the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, and NBC Montana. More photos of the educational flight are posted on Google Photo here.
August
Hu group is in Boise, ID this month, participating in the WE-CAN field campaign and chasing wildfire smoke in the whole western U.S. Looking forward to great science coming out of this awesome dataset!
June
Wade and Lu are back to the NCAR Research Aviation Facility in Broomfield, CO for PTR-TOF-MS installation to the NSF/NCAR C-130 research aircraft, in preparation for the WE-CAN field project. Four group members (Wade, Catie, Qian, and Lu) will be joining a large science team chasing wildfire plumes this summer in Boise, ID.
May
Wade receives the departmental Fred Shafizadeh Memorial Scholarship for excellence in wood (or smoke) chemistry. Congrats, Wade!
We receive UM UGP Seed Grant to bring our PTR-TOF-MS to Alaska to study biogenic VOCs in the Arctic.
Lu attends two workshops this month: NSF-ATC and NCAR Atmospheric Chemistry Workshop 2018 in Boulder, CO, and ALaskan Pollution and Chemical Analysis (ALPACA) in Fairbanks, AK.
April
We receive UM's 2018-2019 The Toelle-Bekken Family Memorial Fund for 'Bringing a flying laboratory into a classroom at UM: a creative curriculum for analytical/environmental chemistry'. This grant will partially support a field trip for students in CHMY 595 Atmospheric Chemistry to NCAR in Boulder, Colorado. CHMY 595 will be offered in this fall.
A joint postdoctoral position to investigate smoke plume chemistry is available immediately.
January
We are hosting several atmospheric chemistry and air quality seminars in the spring semester.
2017
December
Wade and Lu present at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in New Orleans, LA. The photo below: Wade explains how atmospheric mixing height evolution affects wildfire smoke pollution in a city.
November
Lu's paper on global tropospheric ozone is featured at the NASA Aura Science.
Wade and Lu complete a successful test flight. Our PTR-TOF-MS is getting ready for airborne VOC measurements next summer! Photos below: C130 aircraft about to take off, and instruments installed in C130 for the test flights.
August
WE-CAN Test Flights: Where Discoveries Begin. Wade and Lu go to Broomfield CO for instrument installment and testing in the NCAR C130 aircraft. The photo below: Qian and Wade are loading the instrument into a U-Haul truck.
July
BVOC in Arctic project gets funded. We are going to Alaska in 2019!
Lu attends the Interdisciplinary Biomass Burning Initiative (IBBI) workshop, and Wade attends the NCAR ACCORD Fire Data Analysis workshop, both in Boulder, CO.
June
Our wildfire field campaign is in the UM news and reported by the ABC Fox Montana. Other related reports include CSU news, UWyo news, Wired magazine.
May
Wade receives the travel grant to attend the NCAR ACCORD fire workshop.
Lu presents at 8th International GEOS-Chem Meeting in Cambridge MA.
March
Lu gives an invited talk at the UMT Geosciences department.
WE-CAN field campaign gets funded. We are going to be in the airborne phase!
January
Lu presents at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) meeting in Seattle, WA.
Shop officially opens!