January 2003 Meeting Announcement, Delaware Valley Mass Spectrometry Discussion Group

• Topic: "Mass Spectrometry of Individual Ultrafine Particles - What's in the Air We Breathe?"

• Speaker:Murray V. Johnston, Chemistry and Biochemistry Department, University of Delaware

• Date: Monday, January 13, 2003. 6:30 PM

• Time: Social Hour: 6:30 PM. (Pizza and Beer)
  Talk: 7:30 PM.

• Place: Widener University, Webb Room.

• Abstract: For over a decade, mass spectrometry has been used to determine the chemical composition of individual airborne particles. It has been coupled with various size measurement or size selection methods to provide correlated size-composition information of ambient aerosols. Our emphasis has been on the analysis of particles in the 10-200 nm diameter range. This size range is important because of its link to adverse health effects. These particles are hard to characterize since they are too small to be detected and sized by conventional light scattering methods. Correlated size-composition information is obtained by sampling the aerosol with a size-selective inlet and ablating individual particles on-the-fly with a pulsed laser. This approach has been used to obtain size-resolved single particle mass spectra from hundreds of thousands of ambient ultrafine particles at several urban sampling sites.

  In this talk, the methodology for sampling and analysis of ultrafine particles will be reviewed and ambient particle data from the Baltimore supersite will be presented. The Baltimore aerosol is a cacophony of organic, inorganic and metal constituents. What we breathe in depends strongly on the time of day and meteorological variables such as temperature, relative humidity and wind direction.

• Bio: Murray Johnston received a B.S. in Chemistry from Bucknell University in 1976 and a Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1980. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University, he began his academic career in 1982 as Assistant/Associate Professor of Chemistry and Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In 1990, he moved to the University of Delaware where he is currently Professor of Chemistry. He received a Center for Advanced Study Fellowship in 1999, the Outstanding Scholar Award in the College of Arts and Sciences in 2001, and the American Chemical Society Delaware Section Award in 2002. His research includes applications of mass spectrometry to a wide range of materials from airborne particles, to biological macromolecules, to industrial polymers. This work has led to over 90 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters.

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