NOBCChE@Stanford Seminar: Professor Cesunica Ivey, UC Berkeley

"Centering Community in Air Pollution Research"

Host: Ashley Saunders

About the Seminar

Historical policies and implementation of air pollution mitigation strategies are guided by the Clean Air Act of 1990, which requires that regulated emissions sources and regional air pollution concentrations meet established thresholds. Despite its effectiveness at overall air pollution reduction in the U.S., the Clean Air Act is subject to vulnerabilities that precipitate from historical racial-ethnic inequities. In her research and advocacy, Dr. Ivey examines the impacts of historical injustices on air quality through a community lens, with the goals of critiquing structural mitigation and informing the development of individual and household resilience strategies. Communities here are defined as populations that are marginalized by historical discriminatory policies. Centering community voices and lived experiences is critical for transforming policies and practices to reverse and prevent continued air pollution overburdening in these communities.

About the Speaker

Dr. Cesunica Ivey is an assistant professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley and the PI of the Air Quality Modeling and Exposure Lab. She was formerly an assistant professor in the Chemical and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of California, Riverside. She earned her Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2016. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of Nevada Reno through 2017 and was also a visiting scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in the spring of 2018. Her research centers on atmospheric modeling, source apportionment, data assimilation, exposure monitoring, and environmental justice applications. Dr. Ivey was recently honored as part of the C&EN Talented 12 Class of 2021.