Lecture: "Crowd in the Clouds: Atmospheric Life, Human Health & Climate Change"

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow and American Center invite you to a special lecture "Crowd in the Clouds: Atmospheric Life, Human Health & Climate Change" by Fulbright Core Scholar Claire G. Williams (Bridgwater), Ph.D.

Atmospheric biology has a renewed interest and a strange history. Historical interest has been exploration and curiosity. Its pragmatic connections to public health, crops and weather services would come a century later. Atmospheric biology as a discipline expanded in parallel with shipping and aviation. Even so, by the end of World War II, U.S. atmospheric sciences no longer included atmospheric biology but this was not the case in reunited Germany and the former Soviet Union where stationary towers, drones and balloon-based sampling methods continue today to detect airborne particles, biogenic and inert, for climate change and human health in the world’s largest cities. Ongoing atmospheric biology research, such as our project on forest pollen in Siberia, is relevant for learning how atmospheric particles, or primary biological aerosol particles (PBAPs), influence cloud formation, rainfall and the water cycle as well as interact with airborne particulate matter (PM).

Speaker’s bio:

Claire G. Williams (Bridgwater), Ph.D., Research Professor, Department of Environmental Sciences, American University Washington D.C.

Claire Williams, a graduate of North Carolina State University, has served as a tenured full professor at Texas A&M, AAAS fellow at U.S. Dept of State and program manager at Weyerhaeuser Company R&D. She is currently a Fulbright Core Scholar to the Sukachev Institute of Forest in Krasnoyarsk where her research project on forest pollen there includes collaborators from Georg August Universität at Göttingen DE and the Max Planck Institute of Biogeochemistry at Jena DE. Professor Williams has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers and two books, one of which is Conifer Reproductive Biology. This is also the title of a research blog found at diplohaplontic.wordpress.com/.>

#lecture #environment #climatechange #fulbright

Photo