The future of science at the UofU

Cool Science Radio: Future of Science


August 25, 2025
Above: L. S. Skaggs Applied Science Building, University of Utah. Credit: Todd Anderson

The University of Utah has just unveiled the final piece of its Crocker Science Complex, a $97 million Applied Science Project that unites the renovated historic William Stewart Building with the new L. S. Skaggs Applied Science Building.

Pearl Sandick

 

 

Together with the existing Crocker Science Center, the complex creates a 275,000-square-foot hub for research, teaching and collaboration.

Pearl Sandick, interim dean of the College of Science and professor of physics and astronomy, shares how these facilities will advance everything from particle physics to chemistry, biology and engineering. She explains what makes the complex unique, how it will change the student experience and why investing in state-of-the-art STEM spaces matters for Utah’s future.

Sandick also reflects on the blend of history and innovation at the heart of the project and the role the new complex will play in shaping both science education and the state’s economy for years to come.

 

 

SRI Stories: Of Balloons & Pinatas

SRI Stories: Of Balloons & Pinatas


August 25, 2025
Above: Sara Wong

The Science Research Initiative (SRI) team is welcoming an exciting new addition to their roster with Sara Wong, a postdoctoral research fellow specializing in biochemistry and cell biology.

Wong originates from the city-that-never-sleeps, where she attended CUNY Queens College through the Macaulay Honors College. After an initial interest in fine arts, she discovered her passion for biology while volunteering in a research lab studying autophagy — a cellular process where cells degrade and recycle their own damaged or dysfunctional components — in the subject model C. elegans, a microscopic roundworm that has proven to be one of the most intimately understood species in biology.

From studying autophagy’s role in lipid storage to germ cell proliferation, she saw her future in science — but with an artistic taste. The research “[k]ind of felt like making art to me,” says Wong. She accentuated her education through a summertime involvement at Albert Einstein College of Medicine before moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan to pursue graduate school where she joined  Lois Weisman’s lab. There she concentrated on organelle transport in budding yeast to understand how the vacuole is moved into yeast daughter cells during budding (a form of cellular reproduction).

Her thesis work spanned multiple disciplines, with her expertise spanning genetics, microscopy, molecular biology, biochemistry and even the mentorship of undergraduate students.

After earning her doctorate, Wong adjusted her microscopes to focus her research on cells responding to lipid stress in Adam Hughes lab here at the University of Utah. Through her investigation of membrane lipid composition, she found that increased phospholipid unsaturation can trigger the formation of mitochondrial-derived compartments and disrupt large outer-membrane complexes like the TOM complex.

These structural changes are linked as a response to preserve cellular stability, mainly mitochondrial function, under stress. In a warm manner of speech, Wong describes this through a metaphor: “Cells are basically like balloons that are like pinatas for other balloons.”

Wong now looks toward leading her own SRI stream, focusing on two key questions: how do cells adapt to lipid stress and how do lipids themselves change under environmental stresses like cold, low oxygen or diet? Primarily, her stream will experiment with yeast in identifying proteins that mis-localize under high-unsaturation conditions.

Wong envisions a practical environment for her students where they will learn tangible, critical skills in the laboratory including gene manipulation, microscopy and protein analysis.

“The first thing that I would want students to do in my stream is to validate some of these findings . . .” says Wong, “and then figure out why and what that means for the cell.” She seeks to emphasize validating observations, identifying whether mis-localizations are adaptive or detrimental and measuring the effects on cellular growth and survival.

Overall, her vision for her SRI stream is a collaborative environment that fosters student curiosity and insight with valuable mentorship. Even for students who don’t pursue a career in biology, Sara Wong aims to provide a worthwhile experience for them in learning about scientific inquiry and problem solving.

“There's no wrong choice. There's just the best choice that you make.”

By Ethan Hood

SRI Stories is a series by the College of Science, intended to share transformative experiences from students, alums, postdocs and faculty of the Science Research Initiative. To read more stories, visit the SRI Stories page.

 

Kinetic art in the new L. S

Kinetic Art Adorns L. S. Skaggs Building


July 30, 2025
Above:  Looking up under one of three Medusea in the lobby of the L. S. Skaggs Building. Photo credit: Todd Anderson

The opening of the L. S. Skaggs Applied Science Building marks an exciting new chapter for the College of Science. It offers dedicated lab and faculty and student spaces for the departments of Atmospheric Sciences, Physics & Astronomy and the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy . . . and spaces even for kinetic art.

Featured in the atrium and foyer of the building are the art pieces Three Medusae and Sisyphus, both created by artist Bruce Shapiro.

"I believe that motion control is a new art medium." says Shapiro, reflecting on his work.

Three Medusae are 15-foot suspended ball-chain fixtures. (Watch video below.) Each is driven by a motor that propels the chains outward through centrifugal force. Unique patterns can be created by programming the motors — via Raspberry Pi computers — to rotate at different speeds at precisely defined intervals. For synchronization, one Medusa is designated as the “conductor,” relaying instructions to the other two.

The Medusae also feature an illumination system that uses digital multiplex controllers to highlight the chains in the evening. This was developed in coordination with Michael Horejsi, an assistant professor clinical in the Department of Theatre. Horejsi provided critical advice and personally programmed the lightning fixtures. Moreover, it presents a natural opportunity for theatre students to learn about lighting systems.

Video credit: David Kale

Sisyphus, named after the mythological King of Ephyra and his eternal struggle with a boulder, is a kinetic sand display. The piece was inspired by the idea of a robotic Zen garden. A steel ball, moved by a two-motor robot with a magnetic attachment, carves intricate patterns on a bed of sand. Like Three Medusae, Sisyphus can be programmed to create custom patterns.

Through this programming, “there’s essentially an infinite number of possibilities,” said Shapiro. The only limit is human creativity, and a bit of patience in finding the ultimate design. (Watch video of Sysyphus below.)

Video credit: David Kale

Both machines operate using a control system akin to a music player, as described by Shapiro: a Medusa “track” defines speed variations and loops repeatedly. When switching between tracks, a “fade transition” creates a blended progression. The Raspberry Pi stores track plays and transition behaviors. Sisyphus uses a similar track-based system, with the option to activate “shuffle mode” for its playlists.

The control systems are governed by Node.js programs and support user interfaces on both mobile and desktop platforms. This allows users to upload their own tracks, design playlists, and set behaviors for different times of day.

Meet the Artist

Bruce Shapiro

Shapiro grew up with interests in science, music, electronics. He initially pursued a career in medicine, participating in hospital research. It was in this role that he was introduced to IBM-compatible computers. Their modularity and accessibility gave him a platform to experiment with voltage timings, stepper motors, and BASIC programming. This led to his first creation: the EggBot—a stepper motor-driven apparatus that draws intricate patterns on eggs. From that point on, he realized his passion for the scientific and design challenges found in the intersection of art and technology. He retired from medicine and began working with DIY CNC machines, eventually establishing a career in motion control art. His work has since been featured around the world.

Bruce Shapiro's work is the newest addition to the Utah Public Art Collection, which was established in 1985 through the Percent-For-Art Act. This program utilizes 1% of legislative appropriations for Capital Development projects to commission, install, and maintain public artwork across the State of Utah. The Utah Public Art Program is managed through the Utah Division of Arts and Museums (est.1899), which holds the distinction of being our nation's first state arts and culture agency.

All artworks commissioned through the Utah Public Art Program are selected by a unique Committee, comprising State Project Managers, Architects, Community members, leaders, visual arts specialists, and primary users associated with the artwork location. The stated goal is to provide and maintain artwork that represents Utah's many vibrant communities and interests.

by Ethan Hood

Celebrating Simons Fellows

Celebrating Simons Fellows


August 21, 2025
Above: Mladen Bestvina (left) and Yekaterina Yuryevna Epshteyn

The Department of Mathematics celebrates the recognition of two professors on achieving a Simons Fellowship: Mladen Bestvina and Yekaterina Yuryevna Ephsteyn.

The Simons Fellows in Mathematics program, offered by the Simons Foundation, provides tenured faculty in mathematics with a monetary award to extend a sabbatical from one term to a full academic year for related research expenses. Fellows are expected to focus intensively on high-level theoretical research during this leave, using the extended time to make significant advances in their fields. To qualify, applicants must hold a tenured, primary mathematics department appointment, be eligible for sabbatical leave and have institutional approval for a year-long research leave.

Mladen Bestvina

Originally from Croatia, Mladen Bestvina earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Zagreb before completing a Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee in 1984. After beginning his academic career at UCLA, he joined the U in 1994. His research lies in topology, with a focus on geometric group theory—an area that explores algebraic structures through geometric and topological methods. As a Simons Fellow, he values the honor and the opportunity to participate in programs at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge and SLMath in Berkeley. Outside of mathematics, he enjoys biking, hiking, and playing chess.

 Yekaterina Yuryevna Epshteyn

“Katya” earned her undergraduate degree in applied mathematics and physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 2000 before immigrating to the United States as a refugee. She completed her Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh in 2007, followed by an NSF-RTG postdoctoral fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University.

Her current research focuses on two major areas: the development of mathematical and computational models for microstructure evolution in polycrystalline materials, and the design of robust, structure-preserving algorithms for hyperbolic balance laws and related systems with uncertainty. These efforts not only address fundamental mathematical challenges but also have wide-ranging applications in engineering and the physical sciences. This past May she helped organize and host the annual NSF CompMath meeting at the U. 

As a Simons Fellow, she is honored to receive support for her first sabbatical after 15 years at the U. The fellowship offers valuable opportunities for her including focused research, travel, collaboration with colleagues, and exploration of new directions. She is deeply grateful to her mentors, collaborators, and students. Beyond mathematics, she enjoys spending time with family and friends, engaging in outdoor activities, and exploring the arts.

An earlier version of this story by Izabella Bourland first appeared on math.utah.edu

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Great Salt Lake and its watershed is recorded in sediments

Great Salt Lake and its watershed is recorded in sediments


August 20, 2025
Above: Photo of Great Salt Lake, taken in 2020, shows how the rail causeway built in 1959 has divided the lake into bodies with much different chemistries. On the right is lake’s North Arm, which has no tributaries other than what flows through an opening in the causeway from the South Arm and consequently has much higher salinity. The red tint comes from halophilic bacteria and archaea that thrive there. Photo credit: Urvish Prajapati via Pexels.

Geoscientist's analysis of carbon and oxygen isotopes documents profound human-driven changes arising from agriculture and rail causeway.

Gabriel Bowen

Over the past 8,000 years, Utah’s Great Salt Lake has been sensitive to changes in climate and water inflow. Now, new sediment isotope data indicate that human activity over the past 200 years has pushed the lake into a biogeochemical state not seen for at least 2,000 years.

A University of Utah geoscientist applied isotope analysis to sediments recovered from the lake’s bed to characterize changes to the lake and its surrounding watershed back to the time the lake took its current shape from the vast freshwater Lake Bonneville that once covered much of northern Utah.

“Lakes are great integrators. They’re a point of focus for water, for sediments, and also for carbon and nutrients,” said Gabriel Bowen, a professor and chairman of the Department of Geology & Geophysics. “We can go to lakes like this and look at their sediments and they tell us a lot about the surrounding landscape.”

Sedimentary records provide context for ongoing changes in terminal saline lakes, which support fragile, yet vital ecosystems, and may help define targets for their management, according to Bowen’s new study, published last month in Geophysical Research Letters.

This research helps fill critical gaps in the lake’s geological and hydrological records, coming at a time when the drought-depleted level of the terminal body has been hovering near its historic low.

 

“We have all these great observations, so much monitoring, so much information and interest in what’s happening today. We also have a legacy of people looking at the huge changes in the lake that happened over tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years,” Bowen said. “What we’ve been missing is the scale in the middle.”

That is the time spanning the first arrival of white settlers in Utah but after Lake Bonneville receded to become Great Salt Lake.

By analyzing oxygen and carbon isotopes preserved in lake sediments, the study reconstructs the lake’s water and carbon budgets through time. Two distinct, human-driven shifts stand out:

  • Mid-19th century – Coinciding with Mormon settlement in 1847, irrigation rapidly greened the landscape around the lake, increasing the flow of organic matter into the lake and altering its carbon cycle.
  • Mid-20th century – Construction of the railroad causeway in 1959 disrupted water flow between the lake’s north and south arms, which turned Gilbert Bay from a terminal lake to an open one that partially drained into Gunnison Bay, altering the salinity and water balance to values rarely seen in thousands of years.

The new study examines two sets of sediment cores extracted from the bed of Great Salt Lake, each representing different timescales. The top 10 meters of the first core, drilled in the year 2000 south of Fremont Island, contains sediments washed into the lake up to 8,000 years ago.

The other samples, recovered by the U.S. Geological Survey, represent only the upper 30 centimeters of sediments, deposited in the last few hundred years.

“The first gives us a look at what was happening for the 8,000 years before the settlers showed up here,” Bowen said. “The second are these shallower cores that allow us to see how the lake changed after the arrival of the settlers.”

Read the full article by Brian Maffly in @The U.

Life on Mars? Great Salt Lake May Hold Clues

life on Mars? Great Salt Lake may hold some clues


August 14, 2025
Above: Great Salt Lake

Utah’s Great Salt Lake is a place of extremes, and its ecosystem is evidence that life can thrive under some of Earth’s most hostile conditions.

Paulina Martinez-Koury collects samples at the Great Salt Lake in June of 2021. Credit: Bonnie Baxter | Westminster University

Scientist say it may hold clues for life on other planets, too, especially Mars, which was once replete with salty lakes. Specifically, researchers recently found protected crystalline micro-environments at the Great Salt Lake supporting an array of microscopic organisms. The mineral formations could potentially help living things thrive over millennia, even under intense solar radiation, extreme cold and low oxygen.

“If there ever was life on Mars,” said Paulina Martinez-Koury, a [graduate student at the University of Utah and] former biology student with Westminster University’s Great Salt Lake Institute, “it would have been in these bodies of water.”

In 2021, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover landed in the Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lakebed. The rover has collected soil and rock samples across the formation, with the long-term goal of rocketing them to our home planet so scientists can look for evidence of alien life.

The year after the rover began roaming the Martian surface, the Great Salt Lake reached a historic low elevation back on Earth. Scientists with Westminster University scoured the receding shoreline of the lake’s hypersaline north arm. They found dime to palm-sized gypsum crystals entombing microorganisms like bacteria, archaea and fungi.

“We weren’t really prepared for how much diversity there was within,” Martinez-Koury, [who is situated in the Caron Lab in the U's School of Biological Sciences] said.

Gypsum and clay may provide nutrients for the organisms to support themselves, while the outer shell shields them from outside extremes. Similar microbiomes may even exist in the samples collected by Perseverance, the researchers said, since the Red Planet’s drying salty lakes would have left behind the same materials.

The scientists published their findings last week in the journal Astrobiology.

Around 4 billion years ago, Mars looked a lot like Earth with flowing surface water and conditions suitable for life. That changed when the planet lost its magnetic field and atmosphere. Some of its water froze into polar ice caps. Large lakes on the surface became exposed to increased solar radiation and began to shrink, getting saltier and saltier as they evaporated away.

“So at one time, there would have been a lot of salt lakes on Mars,” Baxter said. “And now what we have instead are salt flats.”

That makes the Great Salt Lake, and its super-salty northern half in particular, a useful analog for studying Martian life.

“Anything that can live in the north arm of the Great Salt Lake has to have some pretty special adaptations,” said Martinez-Koury, who is currently working on a Ph.D. at the University of Utah.

The north arm is mostly sealed off from any rivers flowing to the Great Salt Lake by a rock-filled railroad causeway. Its salt content ranges between 25% to 30%. No plant life, brine shrimp or bugs survive under those conditions. Solar radiation is high. But its soupy water has turned a lavender hue due to abundant halophilic microorganisms, proof life can thrive in inhospitable places.

NASA's Mars Perseverance rover captured this image using its onboard Right Navigation Camera (Navcam) on Aug. 12, 2025. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

As the lake’s water receded in its northern stretches, Baxter and Martinez-Koury collected gypsum crystals that emerged on the shoreline, then took them back to the lab.

They crystals also included clays, which may hold water to support life over time. And Baxter said they found evidence some of the organisms can photosynthesize and generate energy.

“So they can actually make oxygen inside the crystal,” Baxter said. “It’s like this little self-sustaining microcosm.”

The crystal samples from the Great Salt Lake are only a few hundred years old or less, Baxter said. But past research shows minerals can encase and preserve biological material over geologic time, and microbes from saline environments can survive millions of years.

“To be flowing at those cold temperatures,” Baxter said, “it would have to be salty water, which makes me kind of excited.”

Astronomers have detected gypsum crystals in Mars’s Jezero Crater, Baxter added. She said she’s eagerly awaiting Perseverance’s samples to get launched back to Earth.

“Many times when I take people up to that north arm of the lake,” Baxter said, “they say ‘This looks like a Martian landscape.’ ... To have science to back up that feeling is kind of cool.”

But the “Mars Sample Return” portion of the interplanetary mission, a cooperative effort between NASA and the European Space Agency, recently hit a snag. This spring, the Trump Administration called for NASA to cut its budget by almost 50% and eliminate the Mars Sample Return project.

Congress stepped in and continued funding for NASA projects through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July, including $700 million that will support the Mars Sample Return. But the bill does not block other budgetary cuts the White House proposed for the agency.

Baxter said she hopes to see the samples in Earth-based labs sometime in the next decade.

New York’s Colgate University, the Utah Geological Survey and Brigham Young University also contributed to the Great Salt Lake gypsum crystal research.

This article by Leia Larsen published through the Great Salt Lake Collaborative and appeared first in the The Salt Lake Tribune. The GSL Collaborative is a solutions journalism initiative that partners news, education and media organizations to help inform people about the plight of Great Salt Lake.

Read all of the Collaborative's stories at greatsaltlakenews.org

 

Message from the Interim Dean

Message from the interim Dean


August 14, 2025

 

Scaling up while scaling down costs

The traditional way to program a computer is with detailed instructions for completing a task. Say you wanted software that can spot irregularities on a CT scan. A programmer would have to write step-by-step protocols for countless potential scenarios.

Instead, a machine learning model trains itself. A human programmer supplies relevant data—text, numbers, photos, transactions, medical images—and lets the model find patterns or make predictions on its own.

Throughout the process, a human can tweak the parameters to get more accurate results without knowing how the model uses the data input to deliver the output.

Machine learning is energy intensive and wildly expensive. To maximize profits, industry trains models on smaller datasets before scaling them up to real-world scenarios with much larger volumes of data.

“We want to be able to predict how much better the model will do at scale. If you double the size of the model or double the size of the dataset, does the model become two times better? Four times better?” said Zhang.

To return to the August COS Faculty & Staff newsletter homepage, click here.

Read the full story by Lisa Potter in @ TheU

A physicist tackles machine learning black box

A physicist tackles machine learning black box


August 13, 2025

From self-driving cars to facial recognition, modern life is growing more dependent on machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that learns from datasets without explicit programming.

Zhengkang (Kevin) Zhang, assistant professor, Department of Physics & Astronomy

Despite its omnipresence in society, we’re just beginning to understand the mechanisms driving the technology. In a recent study Zhengkang (Kevin) Zhang, assistant professor in the University of Utah’s Department of Physics & Astronomy, demonstrated how physicists can play an important role in unraveling its mysteries.

“People used to say machine learning is a black box—you input a lot of data and at some point, it reasons and speaks and makes decisions like humans do. It feels like magic because we don’t really know how it works,” said Zhang. “Now that we’re using AI across many critical sectors of society, we have to understand what our machine learning models are really doing—why something works or why something doesn’t work.”

As a theoretical particle physicist, Zhang explains the world around him by understanding how the smallest, most fundamental components of matter behave in an infinitesimal world. Over the past few years, he’s applied the tools of his field to better understand machine learning’s massively complex models.

 

Scaling up while scaling down costs

The traditional way to program a computer is with detailed instructions for completing a task. Say you wanted software that can spot irregularities on a CT scan. A programmer would have to write step-by-step protocols for countless potential scenarios.

Instead, a machine learning model trains itself. A human programmer supplies relevant data—text, numbers, photos, transactions, medical images—and lets the model find patterns or make predictions on its own.

Throughout the process, a human can tweak the parameters to get more accurate results without knowing how the model uses the data input to deliver the output.

Machine learning is energy intensive and wildly expensive. To maximize profits, industry trains models on smaller datasets before scaling them up to real-world scenarios with much larger volumes of data.

“We want to be able to predict how much better the model will do at scale. If you double the size of the model or double the size of the dataset, does the model become two times better? Four times better?” said Zhang.

A physicist’s toolbox

A machine learning model looks simple: Input data—>black box of computing—>output that’s a function of the input.

The black box contains a neural network, which is a suite of simple operations connected in a web to approximate complicated functions. To optimize the network’s performance, programmers have conventionally relied on trial and error, fine-tuning and re-training the network and racking up costs.

“Being trained as a physicist, I would like to understand better what is really going on to avoid relying on trial and error,” Zhang said. “What are the properties of a machine learning model that give it the capability to learn to do things we wanted it to do?”

In a new paper published in the journal Machine Learning: Science and Technology, Zhang solved a proposed model’s scaling laws, which describe how the system will perform at larger and larger scales. It’s not easy—the calculations require adding up to an infinite number of terms.

Read the full story by Lisa Potter in @ TheU

Anna Little: Above the Noise

Anna LIttle: Above the Noise


August 13, 2025
Above: Anna Little, awardee of the NSF Career Grant

In the constant chaotic communication of the modern day it is vitally important to find promising individuals and raise them above the noise. That is the role of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER program: to find talented researchers and give them funding to catapult their work to new heights.

Anna Little has earned her place amongst those recipients, which includes her colleague Harold Bloom, receiving a grant of $550,000 to advance to the next stage of her career.

A Duke University alumna, Little received her Ph.D. in mathematics there before moving on to a teaching position at Jacksonville University. In an ambitious gamble she left that tenure track position for a research postdoctoral researcher appointment at Michigan State, which clearly paid dividends by setting the groundwork for research she’s being rewarded for today here at the U. 

Little’s work focuses on using geometric methods for high-dimensional data analysis, a particularly useful subject. While current technology allows us to collect huge amounts of data, it is often difficult to analyze that data in numerical form. But analyzing it geometrically can circumvent this issue, visually presenting shapes and patterns amongst the chaos. It is an approach that can be applied to many forms of data, and as Little describes, it really helps break up the “noise.”

“If you’re trying to take a picture of a molecule, you’re going to have a lot of noise in that data,” Little explains, defining that “by noise I mean measurement errors, random shifts or rotations. You’re trying to extract data from a complicated setting.” Noise of this kind is often unavoidable and can start corrupting data, but that’s where the math comes in to repair those gaps. 

On top of this high dimensional analysis, Little is also interested in inverse problems and signal processing. In particular, the analysis of mathematical models inspired by biological applications such as cryo-electron microscopy.

While she isn’t looking for these patterns inside the noise, she often spends her time assisting others to take a break from their own noisy lives. In an initiative that was also supported by her award, she led a retreat for doctorate students and postdocs. In such a highly strenuous field like STEM it can be challenging to find time to take care of oneself, leading to unsustainable performance. Little explains that “It’s important to work smart, to avoid burning out, and to understand one’s limits.”

Whether it be the noise of her research or the noise of life, Anna Little is taking the steps to both overcome it and help others do the same. And thanks to this award she’ll be able to continue to do so for many years to come.

by Michael Jacobsen

Watch for the story (forthcoming) about Harold Blum, Anna Little's colleague in the Department of Mathematics who is also recipient of the prestigious NSF Career Award. 

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Wildfire smoke exacerbates ozone pollution

Wildfire smoke exacerbates ozone pollution


August 13, 2025
Above: The 2020 Loyalton Fire wildfire in Lassen, Plumas and Sierra counties in California and Washoe County in Nevada.

Wildfires release vast amounts of visible pollutants into the atmosphere that darken skies and push people indoors to avoid unhealthy air. But a near-invisible threat to public health associated with wildfires is ozone, the reactive oxygen molecule O3 that harms the lungs and other sensitive tissues in the human body.

New research led by the University of Utah documents how smoke from the West’s wildfires substantially increases ozone concentrations, often above federal health standards, even in remote places with few human emission sources of ozone’s precursor pollutants, such as nitric oxides, or NOx.

“The question I wanted to ask was, if we don’t have urban emissions, let’s say that we zero out all emissions, will we still have an ozone problem?” said lead author Derek Mallia, a research assistant professor of atmospheric sciences. “This study suggests that we could remove all of the regional emissions from anthropogenic sources of NOx, but fires can still produce a large amount of ozone.”

Published last month in the journal Atmospheric Environment, this research highlights the double dose of air pollution in areas downwind from the flames, with high levels of both fine particulate matter and ozone. It is estimated that smoke exposure results in 6,300 deaths a year in the United States.

Complicating this picture is the fact that ozone is not released directly into the air; rather it forms in the atmosphere when oxygen atoms from other pollutants recombine in a photochemical process involving sunlight.

The main drivers are NOx and volatile organic compounds, or VOCs; the latter is a major component of wildfire smoke. NOx, on the other hand, is more associated with anthropogenic emission sources, such as vehicle tailpipes and industrial smokestacks.

Ozone levels are very difficult to model because the pollutant is controlled by so many factors, including wind speed and direction, temperature, cloud cover and time of day.

To better understand the complicated relationship between smoke and ozone, Mallia’s team applied coupled computer models, known as WRF-Sfire and WRF-Chem, to a record-setting smoke event in 2020 that affected much of the Western United States. The period of Aug. 15-26 was among the West’s worst fire episodes in the modern era. California’s August Complex fire burned more than 1 million acres across seven northern counties, causing $12 billion in damage. Dozens of fires raged elsewhere, such as Utah’s 90,000-acre East Fork fire and Oregon’s Lionshead and Beachie Creek fires that burned a combined 400,000 acres.