Courses I Currently Teach

ATMS 211 Climate and Climate Change (5 credits)
This course is open to all undergraduates with an emphasis on non-science majors.We discuss what factors control present climate and environmental issues such as ozone depletion, what the past climate was, and what future climate change may occur. The focus is on the atmosphere's role in and response to climate change. The goal is to present students with a scientific foundation of Earth's climate and atmospheric phenomena so that they can become educated participants in current environmental policy debates outside the classroom.

ATMS 358 Introduction to Atmospheric Chemistry (3 Credits)
This course is aimed at undergraduate Atmospheric Sciences majors, although the content is accessible to any science major. We cover the current composition of the atmosphere, the concepts of atmospheric lifetime and mass-balance, and introduce the chemistry that causes stratospheric ozone depletion, that controls the composition of the lower atmosphere, and that leads to urban smog formation and acid rain.

ATMS 458 Global Atmospheric Chemistry (4 credits); offered jointly with CHEM 458
This course is aimed at upper-level undergraduate science majors and first and second year graduate students. We develop detailed mechanistic understandings of the physical and chemical factors that influence the composition of the lower and middle atmosphere (troposphere and stratosphere). We cover similar issues as ATMS 358 in greater detail as well as the global biogeochemical cycles of Nitrogen and Carbon and the connections between atmospheric composition and climate change. The course provides hands-on analysis of real atmospheric chemistry data sets and current literature discussions.

ATMS 564 Atmospheric Aerosols and Multiphase Chemistry
This course is offered every other year and is open to graduate students in the physical sciences. We cover the physical and chemical properties of atmospheric particles and the theories of what controls these properties. We discuss aerosol size, phase state, chemical constituents, aerosol dynamics, nucleation and growth, atmospheric lifetime, gas-aerosol surface reactions, and cloud processing and cloud chemistry. Lectures are drawn from several texts and the current literature.