Congratulations to Jennifer Alexander for successfully defending her PhD dissertation on "Optical Properties of Mineral Dust Aerosol Including Analysis of Particle Size, Composition, and Shape Effects, and the Impact of Physical and Chemical Processing."

"Mineral dust aerosol plays an important role in establishing the physical and chemical equilibrium of the atmosphere and, hence, significantly affects the earth’s climate. Dr. Alexander’s doctoral thesis research, which was supported by the National Science Foundation, focused on improving models of mineral dust aerosol optical properties. Her work has shown that dust light scattering and absorption are sensitively dependent on particle shape, and that there are important correlations between particle mineralogy and shape that can exploited to improve the accuracy of theoretical simulations of the mineral dust optical properties. She also observed that dust particle shape can be altered through physical and chemical processing, showing that it is important to account for the effects of atmospheric aging of dust during its lifetime and transport in the atmosphere."
— Paul Kleiber, PhD advisor

Dr. Alexander has accepted a permanent staff position as Research Scientist at the United Technology Research Center in Hartford, CT.

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