Lamar University Dan F. Smith Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Faculty Receives More than One Million in Department of Energy Funding

Lamar University has partnered with the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, Prairie View A&M University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to form an Urban Integrated Field Laboratory supported by the Biological and Environmental Research Program of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science (BER-DOE) to study the impacts of climate change on air pollution and flooding in southeastern Texas communities. Out of the $5 million dollars received by Lamar University, more than one million dollars are allocated to Associate Professors Sidney Lin and Clayton Jeffryes and Assistant Professor Tianxing Cai’s research in the Dan F. Smith Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE). Students from CBE also participate in this research project.

Professor Lin serves as the project’s air team lead and will monitor pollutants at stationary sample stations and develop simulation models to study the transport of pollution by air in the Southeast Texas region. “We’re working very closely with team members from UT Austin and their innovative mobile air sampling systems can better help our work in predicting how potentially harmful substances will move by air in the coming decades throughout the SE Texas and during unforeseen chemical releases or natural disasters,” said Dr. Lin. Dr. Cai will support the air measurement and modeling work and supervises the project’s QA/QC. Dr. Jeffryes will oversee pollutant measurements in corresponding soil samples, which represent either a potential final resting place or a potential source for airborne pollutants. Instrumentation to facilitate this work is supported by the Center for Resiliency (CfR), Texas Air Research Center (TARC), and the Center for Advances in Water and Air Quality.

The Lamar University team is led by Dr. Liv Haselbach, who also directs Lamar University’s Center for Resiliency. Other Lamar University investigators on the DOE UIFL project are Professor Qin Qian and Associate Professor Nicholas Brake from the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, and Professor Matt Hoch from the Department of Biology.