Tami Bond
Associate Professor
yark - at - uiuc.edu

Left: Bond Group (and some affiliates) as of 5/2013
L to R: back- Cindy, Arezoo, Tami, Ryan, Alex, Pong, Laura, Srinidhi; front: Cheryl, Tianye, Fran. Missing: Yanju. More information below

Yanju Chen, Post-doctoral researcher

After spending five years in the lab characterizing black carbon and organic carbon from wood combustion, I am turning into a modeler. Exciting! I am investigating the radiative forcing of aerosols (particularly black carbon and co-emitted organic carbon) due to changing emission scenarios (mainly energy-related sources) to provide suggestions to policy makers. In order to solve the problem, I am working on establishing the source-response relationship between emission and radiative forcing to investigate whether there is any linear relationship between them. The most important thing is to constrain the uncertainties of BC forcing from models, because (1) BC forcing is always associated with other co-emitted species, (2) BC cloud forcing is very uncertain because the vertical distribution of BC matters. I run Community Earth System Model (CESM) myself to simulating BC global forcing and analyze data from a regional model Climate - Weather Research and Forecasting Model (CWRF) provided by our collaborators.

Mariam Fawaz, Ph.D. student

I am a Ph.D. student with a focus on experimental work, my research is on the light absorption of particles emitted from wood pyrolysis. I earned a Bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering and a Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the American University of Beirut. 

Emily Floess, M.S. Candidate

I am a Master's student working with the field research team to measure emissions from brick kilns. I also work on the Stored Solar Cooker Project where I am creating a solar resource map of where a stored solar cooker could be used in the world.

I earned my bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  After graduating I spent four years in Liberia as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching high school students math and science and then a year with Water Missions in Liberia, helping to treat drinking water during the Ebola Crisis.

I love being outside, and I like many different outdoor activities!  I especially like running.

Kevin Hade, M.S. Candidate

I completed my undergraduate studies in environmental engineering at Georgia Tech in 2010. I then worked in environmental consulting at ENVIRON where I completed projects related to remediation and air quality modeling, permitting, and compliance. In 2014 I came to UIUC to complete a master’s degree in environmental engineering focusing on the relationships between air pollution, energy, and infrastructure. My thesis studies the effects of long-lived climate pollutants (e.g. CO₂) versus short-lived climate pollutants (e.g. black carbon) on global temperature change and the implications of these effects on the timing and magnitude of emission mitigation strategies.

Nick Lam, Post-doctoral researcher

Nick works on understanding residential energy service needs in developing countries, associated impacts, and strategies for transitioning to cleaner energy-use practices. He is currently working on several field studies examining pollutant impacts of heating and lighting, and is developing a spatially resolved model of residential combustion emissions. 

Liang (Cindy) Liu, Ph.D. candidate

I've been working on modeling the past and future emissions, with a special focus on the transportation sector. My projects include developing global historical emission inventories of short-lived pollutants (CO, BC, OC) and assess the emissions, health and climate impacts of the future freight transportation sector in the United States. I'm interested in applied policy-oriented research which addresses problems relating to environment, economy, public health, and climate change. 

Francisco Mena-Gonzalez, Ph.D. candidate, Fulbright Scholar

Francisco Mena is a doctoral student from Chile, where he earned a B.S. and M.S. in Physics. He is currently writing his doctoral thesis on the optical properties of biofuel burning aerosols, their evolution after emission, and consequent formation into cloud condensation nuclei. He enjoys learning new theories and implementing them in numerical codes. He is passionate about teaching, activism, and the connection between academia and environmental non-profit organizations.

Alexander Torres-Negron, Ph.D. candidate

I am Alexander Torres, licensed professor from the University of Puerto at Mayaguez. My research interests are: aerosol transport and residence time; impacts of air pollutants on surface water quality; application of GIS and Remote Sensing for the air quality monitoring; and the comprehensive analysis of the fate and transport of pollutant in the atmosphere, surface water, and groundwater.

My current research is determining the wet removal of carbonaceous aerosols. Carbonaceous aerosols have optical characteristics that can change light scattering and absorption; thus, they can cool or warm the planet. The magnitude of this effect is related to the residence time of the aerosols in the atmosphere. The residence time is controlled by the removal rate, which is mainly wet deposition due to the small size of the aerosols. The experimental methodology to measure carbonaceous aerosols, which include black and organic carbon, has not been standardized until now; therefore, it is needed to develop a standard procedure to reduce particle losses, reactions, and contamination to finally obtain accurate data. Rain water samples are collected from the National Atmospheric Deposition Network, administrated by the Illinois State Water Survey.

I am a detective working on constraining long-term BC historical emission trend (1960-present) with the observations. This is an important case since it tells us about the historical climate forcing. It is also an inconvenient case since there are limited observations. So I have to dig those evidences out. Another case is studying heterogeneity of BC between simulations at different resolutions, which help quantify the uncertainty for model-measurement comparison.  

Ryan Thompson, M.S. candidate 

I am developing portable equipment and test methods to measure the emissions of rural biomass combustion devices such as cookstoves, heating stoves, and kilns. There is a need for this equipment as a research and development tool to improve current biomass combustion technologies for the sake of human health, our climate, and many other social and environmental benefits. There is also a need for this equipment to get out there and measure unknown rural emission sources to improve global emission inventories.

Cheryl Weyant, Ph.D. candidate

If you're in some obscure location 8 hours from any city, and you see something completely bizarre that's on fire, and you wonder if it's in the emission inventories... Cheryl has probably measured it.

Cheryl studies combustion emissions. She has built and developed field emissions testing equipment that runs off a car battery, can be carried in a backpack and on donkey carts, and can be setup in homes for measurements of particle optics and composition. She has measured cookstove, kiln, and lantern smoke in rural settings in India and Nepal. She wants to know how much these emissions affect the global climate and if new combustion technologies really make a difference when used in the real-world.

Lama Aoudi and Bora Ozaltun, Undergraduate students

Bora is pursuing a primary in Structural Engineering with a secondary in Energy-Water-Environment Sustainability (EWES), and Lama is pursuing an EWES primary with an Environmental Engineering secondary. Our project aims to create a higher resolution global inventory of Heating Degree Days (HDD) using temperature reanalysis data.