March 2024: We are starting a new project funded by NASA to use data from the recently launched NASA EMIT instrument to understand the evolution of dust aerosol mineralogy in the atmosphere.
August 2023: We are starting a new project, titled “Multiscale dynamic assessment of airborne microplastic emissions in tire wear particles” supported by the CenTiRe (Center for Tire Research).
June 2023: Hosein received tenure and promoted to Associate Professor.
March 2023: Nishan receives the Outstanding Student Presentation Award (OSPA) for his presentation entitled “Microplastics Aerosolization by Oceanic Breaking Waves: Experimental Investigation into the Effect of Surface and Sub-Surface Distributed Pristine and Aged Plastic Particles” at the AGU 2022.
December 2022: Hosein receives the 2022 Junior Fellow Award from the Fralin Life Sciences Institute at Virginia Tech.
September 2022: We are recruiting a PhD student in modeling atmospheric microplastics. More information here.
May 2022: Hosein is appointed to serve on the advisory board of the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech. The Global Change Center (GCC) is a university-wide initiative, involving about 100 faculty representing most colleges on Virginia Tech’s campus. The mission of GCC is to advance interdisciplinary scholarship and education to address critical global changes impacting the environment and society.
May 2022: Charbel receives the 2022 Paul E. Torgersen Graduate Student Research Excellence Award (1st place).
June 2021: A story about our recently funded NSF project is published on VTx. Check it out here.
May 2021: Charbel receives the Atmosphere 2021 travel award.
December 2020: Rayssa successfully defended her Masters thesis, entitled “Atmospheric Pollutant Levels in Southeast Brazil During COVID-19 Lockdown: Combined Satellite and Ground-based Data Analysis”.
October 2020: Hosein has become a faculty affiliate with BIOTRANS. BIOLOGICAL TRANSPORT (BIOTRANS) is a Virginia Tech program of education and research at the engineering-biology interface that investigates dynamic transport processes in multiscale biological systems.
August 2020: We are looking for a highly motivated postdoc in the area of aerosol remote sensing and modeling to join our team in an exciting NASA-funded interdisciplinary project looking into microbial biodiversity in trans-Atlantic dust plumes. Click here for more information.
July 2020: Hosein is convening a session at the AGU 2020 Fall Meeting on Aquatic Aerosols with Cassie Gaston (University of Miami), Hannah Horowitz (UIUC), and Francesca Malfatti (University of Trieste, Italy). We welcome theoretical, experimental, observational, biogeochemical, and modeling studies that improve our understanding of aquatic (both marine and freshwater) aerosols from molecular to global scale. Susannah Burrows (PNNL) and Andy Ault (UMich) will be presenting as invited authors in our session. Abstracts are being accepted until July 29, 2020.
May 2020: Our own Charbel Harb is part of a team lead by Dr. Linsey Marr to test the efficacy of sterilized masks and alternative mask materials in filtering particles. The aim is to help quantify how well these equipment filter SARS-COV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Learn more about this work here and check Linsey’s Twitter account for real time results.
January 2020: The submission deadline for a special issue of Atmosphere (Guest edited by Hosein Foroutan) on “Emissions, Transport, and Fate of Pollutants in the Atmosphere” has been extended to May 15, 2020.
December 2019: Find out more about our new research project on measuring, modeling, and forecasting red tide aerosol dispersion along the central Florida gulf coast to facilitate socioeconomic adaptation here.
October 2019: See the press release about a new USDA funded project to track the long-distance transport of wind-dispersed pollen from genetically-engineered crops using flying drones and mathematical models. This project is in collaboration with Schmale Lab and Ross Dynamic Lab at Virginia Tech and Neal Stewart in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Tennessee’s Institute of Agriculture.
September 2019: A PhD position is available in our Lab for a student interested in fine-scale modeling of atmospheric transport. More information here.
May 2019: Dr. Foroutan is the Guest Editor for a Special Issue of Atmosphere on “Emissions, Transport, and Fate of Pollutants in the Atmosphere”. The submission deadline is January 31, 2020.
December 2018: “Coordinated Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) and Ground-Based Weather Measurements to Predict Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCSs)” was published in Sensors. In this collaborative work, we use measurements from a ground-based and two UASs along with WRF-LES simulations to detect attracting regions (Lagrangian Coherent Structures, LCSs) in the lower atmosphere.
October 2018: Our collaborative work with Ross Dynamic Lab on using Generalized Lagrangian Coherent Structures to study pollutant transport in the atmosphere is presented at the CMAS conference. See our poster here.
August 2018: Charbel Harb has joined AIRFlowS as a PhD student. Welcome, Charbel!
June 2018: Dr. Foroutan attended the 111th Annual Conference of the Air and Waste Management Association as an invited panelist.
July 2018: “Adding four-dimensional data assimilation by analysis nudging to the Model for Prediction Across Scales – Atmosphere (version 4.0)” was published in Geoscientific Model Development.
May 2018: “Numerical analysis of pollutant dispersion around elongated buildings: An embedded large eddy simulation approach” was published in Atmospheric Environment.
July 2018: “Adding four-dimensional data assimilation by analysis nudging to the Model for Prediction Across Scales – Atmosphere (version 4.0)” was published in Geoscientific Model Development.
November 2017: Our collaborative work with Schmale Lab and Ross Dynamic Lab titled “Data from flying sensors and modeling efforts to help identify and respond to hazards following hurricanes” is supported by ICTAS, Data and Decisions.