CRAC Researcher Awarded an IRC Elevate Postdoctoral Fellowship

2 Sep 2014

Dr. David O’Connor has been awarded an Irish Research Council Elevate Postdoctoral Fellowship to study at both the Chemistry Department, University of Denver and University College Cork.

This prestigious 3-year grant is co-funded by the EU Marie Curie Actions Programme and the Irish Research Council.

Dave’s project is entitled “The development and application of novel instrumentation to improve our understanding of atmospheric ices, clouds and precipitation”. He will be supervised by Professor Alex Huffman in Denver and by Professor John Sodeau in Cork.

The research itself will involve the development of an entirely new, cheap and robust laser induced fluorescence (LIF) instrument for the detection and characterization of Primary Biological Research Particles (PBAP). Once this task has been completed its integration into a droplet freezing apparatus will be carried out so as to provide a far greater level of characterization for the ice nucleating ability of PBAP to be determined than is currently the case. It will then be deployed back in Ireland at a field site. The results will be relevant to climate change research because our current knowledge about the composition of airborne ice nuclei distributed on a global basis is poor. For example there are large uncertainties associated with the prediction of any PBAP/ice impacts on important cloud properties, such as precipitation formation or radiative (climate change) forcing potentials.