2023 Award Winners

Sheldon K. Friedlander Dissertation Award

Haoxuan Chen

Haoxuan Chen is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Health at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. He completed his Ph.D. dissertation in 2020 under the supervision of Prof. Maosheng Yao in Environmental Sciences at Peking University. His Ph.D. dissertation focuses on the rapid detection of exposure to aerosols from various sources and understanding their health effects by utilizing novel biomarkers in exhaled breath. He has published 23 peer-reviewed articles and received four patents.

---

Kenneth T. Whitby Award

Gabriel Isaacman-VanWertz

Gabriel Isaacman-VanWertz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. He completed his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, after which he spent two years as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT. He is originally from the East Coast, growing up in Maryland and completing his undergraduate at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. His work focuses on understanding the detailed chemical composition of atmospheric gases and particles, and he loves to spend time tinkering with new instruments. AAAR has been his scientific home since he started grad school nearly15 years ago, and he has served as a working group chair, newsletter editor, and symposium organizer. Although he is spending this year in Ecuador as a Fulbright Scholar, he has never missed a AAAR meeting and is happy to be able to keep the streak going.

---

David Sinclair Award

Barbara Finlayson-Pitts

Barbara Finlayson-Pitts is UCI Distinguished Professor Emerita and Professor of Chemistry Recalled at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside and after a year of postdoctoral research, she joined the faculty at California State University Fullerton. In 1994, she moved to UCI where she founded and co-directs AirUCI, a collaborative of 31 faculty across the physical sciences, engineering, public health and the social sciences. Her particle research has run the gamut from the reactivity of sea salt particles to new particle sources and growth mechanisms, with a focus on molecular level understanding. A current interest is non-tailpipe emissions from vehicle brakes and tires that will remain as we transition to electric vehicles. Dr. Finlayson-Pitts has coauthored more than 200 scientific publications and two books and her research has been recognized by a number of awards including the ACS Award for Creative Advances in Environmental Science & Technology, and election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

---

Benjamin Y.H. Liu Award

Dr. Jason Olfert

Dr. Jason Olfert is Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta. His research is focused on developing novel aerosol instruments and characterizing particulate emissions from combustion sources. Dr. Olfert’s past and current research is focused on particulate emissions from internal combustion engines, gas turbine engines, flares, and burners. He has worked on the development of the centrifugal particle mass analyzer, aerodynamic aerosol classifier, and the miniature inverted soot generator which are all commercially available instruments. He has over 100 peer-reviewed journal publications. Dr Olfert serves as an editor for the journal Aerosol Science and Technology. Dr Olfert has been awarded the Sheldon K Friedlander Award, Masao Horiba Award, and Fissan-Pui-TSI Award for his contributions to aerosol science. He is also the founder of Argonaut Scientific Corporation which sells the miniature inverted soot generator.

---

Susanne V. Hering Award

Ann Marie Carlton

Ann Marie Carlton is a professor and vice chair of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. She holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Bioenvironmental Engineering and a Ph.D. in environmental science all from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. She has worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Dr. Carlton is a scientific leader of the Southern Oxidant and Aerosol Study and served on the National Academy of Sciences’ panel to write The Future of Atmospheric Chemistry Research. She is a former co-editor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and presently an editor of Reviews of Geophysics. She also serves on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science Magazine. Professor Carlton received the 2021 Roger Revelle Fellowship in Global Stewardship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was placed in the Climate and Environment team in the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy.

---

Thomas T. Mercer Joint Prize

Chantal Darquenne

Chantal Darquenne is a Professor in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine (section of Physiology) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the former President of the International Society of Aerosols in Medicine (ISAM, 2019-2021). She earned her Ph.D. degree in Applied Sciences from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) in 1995 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Division of Physiology at UCSD. Dr. Darquenne is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Aerosol Medicine and Pulmonary Drug Delivery, the Journal of Aerosol Science and the Journal of Applied Physiology. Her research and publications have focused on the fate of inhaled aerosols in the human lung with applications both in toxic effects of airborne particulate matter and in therapeutic effects of inhaled pharmaceutical aerosols, and also on lung ventilation inhomogeneities in health and disease. Her major research contributions in the field include the study of aerosol inhalations in humans in altered gravity, the development of numerical models that simulate the transport and deposition of aerosols in the lung, the effect of lung disease on both regional and overall aerosol deposition, and the study of upper airway dynamics during breathing and its effect on aerosol transport. Her research is mainly funded through awards and contracts with the National Institute of Health (United States) and with the US Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Darquenne is a fellow of ISAM.

---