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Claudio Mazzoleni and Will Cantrell Receive 2024 Juan Fernandez de la Mora Prize

Published September 20, 2024

Awards
News

Professor Claudio Mazzoleni (Physics) and Dean/Professor Will Cantrell (GS/Physics) are recipients of the 2024 Juan Fernandez de la Mora Prize from the American Association for Aerosol Research.

The prize recognizes Mazzoleni and Cantrell’s contributions to experimental research in aerosol science. Their group will receive a differential mobility analyzer (DMA) as a gift from Professor Juan Fernandez de la Mora, a faculty member at Yale University, to measure size distributions of nanometer particles at high resolution.

About the Juan Fernandez de la Mora Prize

The study of nanometer particles at high resolution has been held back by the limited number of research groups having high-resolution nano-DMAs. To stimulate research in the field, a prototype of a Half-Mini DMA (1,2), which has been developed by Dr. Juan Fernandez de la Mora, a faculty member at Yale University, will be awarded by the AAAR to an AAAR member. One instrument will be awarded each year as a gift from Juan Fernandez de la Mora, and the license to operate it is a gift from the NanoEngineering Corporation (NEC).

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Volcano Research Expert Simon Carn Wins 2024 MTU Award

Published August 21, 2024

By cmazzoleni

Awards
News

Simon Carn - Volcano Research — **Simon Carn**
Distinguished Professor, Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences

Simon Carn is an expert in volcano research. He won the 2024 Michigan Tech Research Award for using satellites to study volcanic activity around the world. Carn has received about $15 million in research grants from top agencies like NASA, the NSF, and the USGS.

He is known globally for studying volcanoes with satellite data. His work is helping to advance volcano research.

Tech Team Tackles Tar Balls’ Impacts On Climate

Published February 2, 2024

By

Research by Claudio Mazzoleni and physics alumni Susan Mathai ’23 and Swarup China ’12 featured in a news article in Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) by the EMSL. Mazzoleni and a multi-institutional team of researchers set out to determine exactly how solar radiation from the sun interacts with individual tar balls dispersed over a mountainous region in northern Italy. The research assesses the optical properties of individual tar balls to better understand their influence on climate.

Tar balls, found in biomass-burning smoke (think smoke from forest fires), impact the Earth’s radiative balance. Understanding the optical properties of tar balls can help reduce uncertainties associated with the contribution of biomass-burning aerosol in current climate models.

The original paper was selected for the cover of the Nov 7th issue of Environmental Science and Technology, and was co-authored by Tyler Capek and Susan Mathai (both Physics); Daniel Veghte of The Ohio State University; Zezhen Cheng, Swarup China ’12 (PhD Atmospheric Sciences), Libor Kovarik, Mazzoleni, and Kuo-Pin Tseng, of the PNNL; and Silvia Bucci and Angela Marinoni, Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (ISAC)-National Research Council of Italy.

Image of Claudio Mazzoleni — Claudio Mazzoleni
Professor, Physics

Image of Susan Mathai — Susan Mathai ’23

Image of Swarup China — Swarup China ’12

Two Students Receive DoD SMART Scholarships

Published July 1, 2022

By Nathanael Black

Ph.D. candidates Dan Yeager and Lucas Simonson have each been awarded a Department of Defense Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (DoD SMART) Scholarship.

The DoD SMART Scholarship provides students with full tuition for up to five years, mentorship, summer internships, a stipend, and full-time employment with the DoD after graduation. Dan and Lucas join a list of 26 prior Michigan Tech Huskies to have received this prestigious scholarship.

Dan is working with Professor Raymond Shaw, with a focus on cloud micro-physics and computational fluid dynamics. He is also serving as a physics representative to the Graduate Student Government.

Yeager will be affiliated with the Naval Oceanographic Office in Mississippi.

Lucas is working with Professor Ramy El-Ganainy, where he studies Integrated Optics and Photonics; learning how light and matter interact on a quantum scale.

Simonson will be affiliated with the US Army’s C5ISR Center in Ft. Belvoir, Virginia.

Guest Blog: Uncovering Global Dust-Climate Connections

Published May 31, 2022

By Nathanael Black

News

By Kimberly Geiger, College of Engineering

A satellite photo of a dust storm — “Godzilla” Saharan dust storm in June 2020. Photo courtesy of NASA.

Developed at Michigan Tech, a new global weather station-based dataset named dulSD is enabling long-term, large-scale monitoring of the dust cycle.

As wind shapes the surface of the Earth, it pulls dust from dry, exposed land surfaces into the atmosphere. Xin Xi (GMES) uses observations and models to study the sources, transformation and transport of dust to assess its impact on climate and air quality.

“Airborne dust aerosols impact the Earth in a myriad of ways,” he explained. “Mineral dust interacts with the global energy budget, ocean biogeochemistry, air quality and agriculture.”

Satellite remote sensing, a major source of information to study global dust variability, lacked the specifics Xi needed. He revisited the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Integrated Surface Database and set out to create a new dataset for evaluating global dust, which he named duISD.

How much dust is there? Read more on Unscripted, the University’s research blog.

New Funding

Published August 19, 2021

By Nathanael Black

News

Raymond Shaw (Physics/EPSSI) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $2,903,682 research and development grant from the National Science Foundation.

Shaw, co-investigators Will Cantrell, Kartik Iyer, Claudio Mazzoleni, and researchers from institutions across the country will collaborate on the project titled “A Community Laboratory Facility for Exploring and Sensing of Aerosol-Cloud-Drizzle Processes: The Aerosol-Cloud-Drizzle Convection Chamber.”

The proposed ACDC2 cloud chamber will be a world class facility, capable of producing droplets up to the size of drizzle while allowing air motion analogous to that in real clouds.

In Print

Published April 1, 2020

By Heather Powers

Complex, noncore-shell morphology of BC-containing particle, from Figure 1, image A in recent study.

A recent study, Radiative absorption enhancements by black carbon controlled by particle-to-particle heterogeneity in composition, stemming from a collaboration between Brookhaven National Laboratory, Michigan Tech, and other institutions was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and has been highlighted in the research highlights section of Nature Climate Change this March.

The research resulted in the development of a new modeling approach – guided by experimental results – to account more accurately for the effects of soot on climate. Coauthors of the paper include two former students of the Atmospheric Sciences Ph.D. program from the physics department, Drs. Janarjan Bhandari and Swarup China.

Janarjan Bhadari, ’18, currently works at the Hormel Institute, University of Minnesota, and Swarup China, ’14, is at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

New Funding

Published October 28, 2019

By Heather Powers

News

Pengfei Xue (CEE/GLRC) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $109,790 research and development cooperative agreement with the University of Michigan.

The project is entitled, “The Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR): Long-Term Data Assimilative, Temperature and Currents Database for the Great Lakes (Year 2: Lake Michigan).

This is a one year project.