Posted by Carol Hutchinson on Aug 23, 2019
Guest Speaker:  Friday, September 6, 2019 12:00 to 1:30 pm
Location:  The National Club, 303 Bay Street
Topic: "“The Air Up There: Adventures in Arctic Atmospheric Chemistry
Host: Peter Love, Club Past President
 
 
Jennifer Murphy is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto, where she held a Canada Research Chair in Atmospheric and Environmental Chemistry from 2007 – 2016. She completed her BSc at McGill University in 2000 with a BSc in Chemistry and a minor in Environmental Studies. During her PhD in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley (2000-2005), she tracked the sources of air pollution influencing the deposition of nutrients to Lake Tahoe and studied smog in central California. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of East Anglia (2005-2006), she operated a mass spectrometer aboard a research aircraft flying over West Africa to measure volatile organic compounds emitted from tropical forests.
 
At the University of Toronto, she mentors a team of graduate students, undergraduate students and postdoctoral fellows whose research focuses mainly on understanding the sources and sinks of reactive nitrogen in the atmosphere and on biosphere-atmosphere exchange. Her team has performed fieldwork across Ontario and in California, Utah, Colorado, northern Michigan, the Alberta oil sands region, and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. They deploy instruments at ground sites, on tall towers, balloons, aircraft and on ships to measure chemicals in the atmosphere. Her group’s analyses of long-term observations from government monitoring networks provides insights into the trends in air pollution in Canada over the last two decades.
 
Professor Murphy serves as a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry project, as a board member of the Royal Canadian Institute for Science, and on the editorial board of the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. At the University of Toronto, she serves on the President’s Advisory Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability. In 2019, she was recognized with an Ascent Award, which recognizes excellence in research and leadership, from the Atmospheric Science section of the American Geophysical Union.