Let me introduce you to our newest graduates, Dr. Crystal McClure and Dr. Pao Baylon! A few raindrops didn’t diminish their sunny smiles and the cheering crowd as they marched at the University of Washington’s graduation on June 9, 2018. We celebrate your success and are so excited for both of you!
Pao is employed at the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality in Boise. Crystal will begin a post-doctoral fellowship at UC Davis in August.
Congratulations to Pao Baylon for the successful defense of his PhD thesis on May 31, 2017! His dissertation, titled Impact of Stratospheric Intrusions, Regional Wildfires, and Long-Range Transport Events on Air Quality in the Western United States, was the culmination of 6 years of hard work in the Jaffe Group. Pao was the first author on 3 peer-reviewed papers, and his fourth paper is currently in review. (See his papers on the Publications page.) He is now employed at the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, Air Quality Division.
Pao shared some advice for graduate students: “Grad school is a cycle of ups and downs, and to survive this journey you should celebrate your triumphs and avoid dwelling on your lows.” And we celebrate you, Pao!
Two Jaffe Group members have published peer-reviewed papers in October. Well done to Xi Gong and Pao Baylon for their outstanding work!
Xi Gong and her coauthors used a statistical approach, the Generalized Additive Model, to quantify ozone impacts from wildfires on 8 US cities. They showed that this approach can provide quantitative support for situations when large contributions from noncontrollable sources, such as wildfires, caused an exceedance of the EPA’s daily ozone standard.
Pao Baylon and his coauthors looked at a Siberian biomass burning event in Spring 2015 that was observed at Mt. Bachelor Observatory and by satellite instruments, and also intercepted by a research aircraft. When the plume was in the eastern Pacific, it split into two plumes, one moving eastward toward MBO and the other moving northeast to Alaska and then south to the US Midwest. The second plume was observed by the aircraft in the Midwest. Baylon et al. found that the ozone production observed at MBO was higher than that of the aircraft plume. This was due to the plume at MBO being warmer and the aircraft plume being colder.