Campus Connection

Alumnus on NASA research team measures air pollution above one of the world’s smoggiest places

When Jason Schroeder was a UWL undergraduate student, he pictured his future in chemistry: a white lab coat and goggles while quietly conducting experiments in his lab. Schroeder says that image wasn’t quite right. Instead, the 2009 graduate has been soaring thousands of feet above South Korea in a passenger jet with a dozen or more NASA scientists. Inside the gutted plane, re-purposed into an “air quality lab,” the scientists use high-tech instruments to measure air pollution through a partnership with Korea called KORUS-AQ. South Korea — home to about 50 million people — has some of the worst air quality in the world. The country wants change, so NASA is helping them better understand the source of the pollution — particularly how much is self generated and how much is coming from China. Schroeder is a post-doctoral researcher with NASA. It’s a position that’s required plenty of high-flying endeavors, as well as developing new ways of using satellites to better understand air pollution. [caption id="attachment_48349" align="aligncenter" width="685"] After graduating from UWL with a degree in chemistry, Jason Schroeder went on to earn a doctoral degree at University of California-Irvine in chemistry.[/caption] Schroeder says his undergraduate research experience with UWL Chemistry Professor Keith Beyer initially got him interested in atmospheric chemistry and research, which led to earning his doctoral degree in chemistry and pursuing his current work with NASA. Schroeder says he didn’t even know what atmospheric chemistry was until he met Beyer, who studies how air pollution molecules affect solid formations in clouds such as ice crystals. Schroeder was a “very curious and motivated” research student who was often coming up with his own research questions, recalls Beyer. Schroeder has always enjoyed the outdoors and preserving nature. He also suffers from asthma, so atmospheric research was a natural fit, he says. “Being able to do work related to understanding nature and improving air quality and pollution that affect people like me seemed like something I’d like to do,” he explains. As an undergraduate researcher under Beyer, Schroeder authored five, peer-reviewed publications in a top chemistry journal, the Journal of Physical Chemistry. Beyer says that accomplishment is rare for an undergraduate researcher. Most undergraduate research students never end up co-authoring a peer-reviewed publication in an international journal, let alone five times. “Up until Jason, I had only two students who were undergraduate co-authors on four publications, so having five publications from undergraduate work is simply unheard of,” says Beyer.  “In several cases Jason's work became the foundation on which other undergraduate students' work was based.” Schroeder calls Professor Beyer a great mentor. “The research projects he set up that were ideal for an undergraduate to work on,” he says. “Sometimes you can have experiments where the student or researcher is not doing the actual experiment as much as getting it set up. When I joined Dr. Beyer, everything was set up. I came in, did the experiment, and with each experiment, I was able to produce a publication.” Schroeder says faculty at UWL in general are “excellent.” Small class sizes allowed lectures to be more like discussions, which helped him gain a strong understanding of the fundamentals, he says. “I didn’t realize how lucky I was to go to a smaller school with faculty who are good at teaching and doing research at the same time,” he says. What does chemistry have to do with smog? Smog is a mixture of multiple, different chemical compounds. Two of the most important, because of their detrimental effects on human health, are ozone and particulate matter, says Chemist Jason Schroeder. Both ozone and particulate matter are produced by chemical processes, meaning they are not emitted directly from human activity. However, human pollution is the precursor to creating them. Chemists like Schroeder help pinpoint the source of these hazardous chemical compounds.