Testing human exposure to diesel exhaust

March 3, 2015

The Institute is delighted to welcome William Brune, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University, as Peter Wall International Visiting Research Scholar to UBC.

Brune’s research addresses fundamental questions of air quality near the Earth’s surface and atmospheric effects of global pollution in the middle and upper troposphere.

During his stay at UBC, he will be working with UBC host, Chris Carlsten from the Faculty of Medicine and the School of Population and Public Health, to bring Brune’s innovative Potential Aerosol Mass (PAM) concepts chamber to UBC’s Air Exposure Pollution Lab (APEL).

Carlsten is recognized for his novel methods for performing safe human exposure tests to a variety of inhaled toxicants in order to understand mechanisms by which these toxicants effect our respiratory and immune systems.

Leveraging principles of PAM, Brune and Carlsten intend to rapidly age diesel exhaust- in just a few minutes- so that it has the properties of exhaust that has been subject to days to weeks of chemical aging in the atmosphere. They will then study the effects of human exposure to this more realistic aged diesel exhaust.