Exposure to air pollution can affect even the most healthy people. Long-term exposure can lead to chronic deseases and premature deaths. The goal of our research is to reach an in-depth mechanistic understanding of how atmospheric particulate matter affect human health through controlled laboratory exposure experiments.
Our research spans various fields in the earth sciences, including dust storm forecasting, extreme precipitation events, flash floods, sinkhole formation, optical disorders caused by aerosols, and 3D mapping of air pollutants, along with more theoretical studies of AI in earth sciences, such as efficient augmentation of meteorological data, foundational weather models, generative models of atmospheric data, and physics-inspired neural networks.
Formation of ice crystals in the atmosphere can influence clouds properties, cloud interaction with radiation and formation of precipitation and therefore have an important impact on the Earth's climate. However, it remains one of the great challenges to predict atmospheric ice processes.
Microorganisms carried by dust storms are transported through the atmosphere and may affect human health and the functionality of microbial communities in various environments. Characterizing the dust-borne microbiome in dust storms of different origins or that followed different trajectories provides valuable data to improve our understanding of global health and environmental impacts.
Atmospheric aerosols affect Earth's climate through modifiication of the Earth's radiation budget by interaction with solar and terrestrial radiation. Scattering aerosols can leat to atmospheric cooling, while absorbing aerosols can cause to warming effect. We focus in the optical properties of aerosols and how these properties change with chemical reactions that are likely to occur in our atmosphere.
