Team


Ronald Cohen

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Ronald C. Cohen attended Wesleyan University where he received his BA with high honors in 1985. He attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. under the supervision of Richard Saykally in 1991. From 1991-1996 he was Postdoctoral Fellow and then a Research Associate at Harvard University with James G. Anderson. In 1995 he joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and of Earth and Planetary Science. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2002. He is a Faculty Scientist, in the Energy and Environment Technologies Division, LBNL (1996-present). In 2006-2007 he was a Visiting Professor, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Division of Biogeochemistry, Mainz, Germany. Cohen has shared the NASA Group Achievement Award, in 2005 and in 1998. He has received awards from the Hellman Family Faculty Fund, (1999); and a Regents Junior Faculty Fellowship, (1998). He is an Editor of the open access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.


Post Doc

Pietro Vannucci

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Pietro graduated from the Cohen Lab in December 2023. He continues to work on the BEACO2N project as a postdoc at USC.


Grad Students

Naomi Asimow

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Naomi is a fourth year Ph.D. student in Earth and Planetary Science. She completed her undergraduate at Harvard University and joined the Cohen Lab in August 2020 to work on the BEACO2N project.


Yishu Zhu

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Yishu is a Ph.D. student who joined the BEACO2N team in Summer 2020. She did her master study on the morphology of atmospheric aerosols at Peking University.


Anna Winter

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Anna is a Ph.D. student who joined the BEACO2N team in Spring 2022. She completed her undergraduate at Upper Iowa University.


Milan Patel

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Milan is a Ph.D. student who joined the BEACO2N team in Spring 2022. He completed his undergraduate at the University of North Carolina.


Staff

Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman has been collaborating with and advising the BEACON team since spring of 2014. She earned her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2010 and currently works as a Bay Area-based freelance industrial product designer and developer. More information can be found at: http://catkaynew.com.


Alumni

Helen Fitzmaurice

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Helen worked on assessing vehicle fuel efficiency using the BEACO2N network and is involved in climate education outreach.


Alex Turner

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Alex was a postdoc with Cohen Research where he did forward and inverse modelling for BEACO2N. He's interested in characterizing the underlying physical processes that control CO2 concentrations in urban areas. Alex is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington.

https://alexjturner.github.io


Virginia (Jill) Teige

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Virginia (Jill) Teige completed her bachelor's degree in chemistry in her hometown of Bloomington, Indiana at Indiana University. While at Indiana University, she was twice awarded the Klinge scholarship for excellence in science and dedication to outreach and education. She has taught chemistry to students from 1st grade up to junior level in college, and remains dedicated to community outreach through the BEACON Project. She designed and built the first generation of BEACON nodes. She had been active in every node deployment, and earned the moniker "Node Woman" from the BEACON participants.


Alexis Shusterman

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Alexis Shusterman graduated from Brown University in May 2013 with a degree in chemistry and a passion for science communication, for which she was recently awarded second place in the American Chemical Society's 2014 Chemistry Champions competition. At Berkeley, Alexis remained active in community outreach via BEACON school visits, Bay Area Scientists in Schools, Iota Sigma Pi National Honor Society for Women in Chemistry, and after-school tutoring at Berkeley High School. Supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, Alexis worked on the deployment of the second generation of BEACON nodes, along with analysis of the data collected.


Katja Seitz

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Katja Seitz Weichsel worked on the BEACON project from spring 2012 through fall 2013. She studied physics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany and started working in atmospheric chemistry during her diploma thesis at the Institute of Environmental Physic in Heidelberg. First she studied atmospheric trace gases of the free troposphere at Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze. During her PhD thesis at the same institute she changed subject to study the halogen emission of seaweed at the Irish West Coast. After completing her PhD she did a postdoc in Heidelberg, but spend time at UEA, Norwich to study the results of her thesis using a 2D model. After working on gases so close to the detection limit for years, she was quite happy to work with high concentrations on the BEACON project.


Kevin Worthington

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Kevin Worthington is a Staff Data Scientist with Cohen Research. He earned a Master's degree in Environmental Applied Science and Management from Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. His Master’s thesis involved developing a web-based application for managing, visualizing, and analyzing mobile air quality measurements collected by citizen scientists as they bicycled around the city of Hamilton Ontario. Upon graduation he worked for the Southern Ontario Centre for Atmospheric Aerosol Research (SOCAAR) in the department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Toronto. At SOCAAR Kevin created a system for visualizing multiple air quality sensor networks in real-time, include one designed and manufactured within his group.


Alvaro Valle

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Alvaro is a first year graduate student studying urban NOx chemistry.

He grew up in Gainesville, FL (Go Gators!) and received his BA from Harvard in May, 2018.


Katherine Chan

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Katherine did her undergraduate work at Wellesley College and joined the Cohen lab in October 2018. She was involved in looking at data on CO2, CO, and aerosols from the BEACO2N site in Houston. 


Jinsol Kim

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Jinsol graduated from the Cohen Lab in Fall 2020 and continued to work on BEACO2N as a postdoc at USC.

Her research is focused on learning how CO2 is emitted and transported in urban environments.