Jim Smith
Scientist III
Ultrafine Aerosols Group |
Research Interests
I am head of the Ultrafine Aerosols Research Group in the NESL’s Atmospheric Chemistry Division. I encourage you to visit the group web pages and learn more about who we are and what we do! I am also presently a visiting professor in the Aerosol Physics Group at the University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio.
I am
interested in ultrafine particles in the atmosphere. These are particles with diameters
smaller than 100 nm, or about a thousandth the diameter of a human hair.
Although these particles are very small, they can have huge effects to our
health and climate:
- They
can trigger severe respiratory problems because they are inhaled deeply into the
lungs. The smallest particles even have the ability to pass through cell
membranes and thus move from the lung tissue to just about every organ in
the body!
- They
are also subset of particles upon which cloud droplets form. Understanding their chemical
composition will improve our understanding of how clouds form, as well as
how human and biogenic activity may influence our climate.
I am an experimentalist, meaning I use both
controlled experiments in my laboratory as well as observations in a variety of locales to study
ultrafine particle physical and chemical properties.
The most important tool that I use is called a
Thermal Desorption Chemical Ionization Mass Spectrometer
(TDCIMS).
The TDCIMS was developed in collaboration with
Peter McMurry's
group at the University of Minnesota. This instrument allows us to measure
the chemical composition of particles as small as 4 nm in diameter.