2009-2010

Africa has experienced dramatic environmental changes as a consequence of rapid human population increase, economic development activities, and lack of appropriate environmental management. The present project will examine the effect of one important environmental change in tropical Africa - deforestation - on the chemistry and microbial community of aquatic habitats of the African malaria vector, Anopheles gambiae, in relation to larval mosquito development and survivorship.

This project will develop and study low-cost monitoring and feedback devices to reduce residential energy consumption. The design team is a trans-disciplinary collaboration to simultaneously optimize the economic, engineering and psychological factors. Devices will be distributed throughout a home to provide immediate ambient feedback and communicate with a hub to provide web-based feedback. A study will measure the effectiveness of the different monitoring and feedback configurations in reducing energy consumption through in-home testing, focus group, and quantitative analyses.

Atmospheric organic aerosols are complex mixtures of chemicals produced by incomplete atmospheric oxidation of anthropogenic and biogenic volatile organic compounds (VOC). Organic aerosols affect climate on both global and local scales and pose significant health risk in the urban environment. Atmospheric chemists understand the initial steps of VOC oxidation reasonably well. However, the processes taking place after the first-generation products of VOC oxidation condense in organic aerosols, and after the organic aerosols dissolve in fog and cloud droplets, remain poorly characterized.

Volatile fluorinated compounds such as nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), tetrafluoromethane (CF4), sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), and trifluoromethyl sulfur pentafluoride (SF5CF3) are chemically very stable, resulting in long atmospheric lifetimes on the order of hundreds of years. They are also very effective in absorbing energy in the infrared band. As a result, they are potent greenhouse gases and can have a strong impact on the global climate even at very low concentrations. Large amounts of these gases are used by the semiconductor industry, but the emissions are not well quantified. In the case