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"Julie Fry"

Chem Major Nabs Class of 鈥�21 Award

The effect of nitrogen dioxide on aerosol formation might not sound like a particularly creative field of study—unless you study at .

Chem major Danielle Draper ’13 just won the coveted Class of ’21 Award, recognizing exceptional creativity, initiative, and spontaneity, for her thesis, which looked at how nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) emitted by vehicles affects the formation of aerosols, or tiny particles, in forests. It turns out that trees naturally emit gasses—like those responsible for the scent of spruce needles—that turn into aerosols in the atmosphere. Danielle wanted to know how that process was affected by manmade emissions--in other words, how humans are changing the “natural” flow of a forest. In particular, she investigated this reaction as it occured at night, under the cover of darkness.

To conduct her experiments, Danielle had to construct an atmospheric chamber, build a special computer model to study chemical kinetics, and analyze reams of data. Her findings were intriguing. While most tree emissions (e.g. the spruce-scent particles) react with NO₂ to create more particles in the atmosphere than they would have alone, alpha-pinene, an emission largely found in pine trees, actually produced fewer particles when combined with NO₂.