In this month's feature interview, we speak with Simmons professor, course designer and Representative in Paraguay at the Pan American Health Organization, Marcelo Korc.

Dr. Korc, what initially drew you to the chemical engineering realm of study, where you started your career?

That’s a good question. Immaturity? [laughs] I was living in Uruguay, where I was born. I lived there until I finished high school, and at that time in Uruguay, in your last year of high school you had to guide yourself towards a specific career, so I did engineering, but at the time my love was more so environmental issues, but at the time, environmentalism was just not a career in its own right. So, I started in the chemical engineering field, but I was personally always geared more towards the environmental field. Eventually, I did my undergrad in Israel and my Ph.D. in the States. So then after I finished my Ph.D., my first job was to work in the field of air quality research, in northern California. What you would call today a “startup” but at the time we just called it a little place, made up of researchers of air quality. So, then, that was how I was able to eventually connect my background in chemical engineering with my passion for environmental issues.

I suppose that was when the idea and issue of “smog” was emerging in California and the nation?

Yes, this was the early 90s. At that time many studies were being conducted in the states to understand, three-dimensionally, the air pollution episodes that were happening in different parts of the country. We started in southern California, the typical Los Angeles area, but also the Lake Michigan area as well. We also worked with the Northeast corridor, from North Carolina to Canada. However, instead of just doing surface measurements, we did measurements with aircraft, so we were able to get a more three-dimensional measure of the cloud as it moved and developed, not just the impact on the terrestrial surface level. This data helped us understand the episodes better as well as how to attempt to control them. 

I recall how in the media at the time it was largely covered as something that tended to be confined to Los Angeles or Hong Kong; I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on how it’s shifted to a much more mainstream topic over the past 30 years or so.

At the time we were focusing on what were called “episodes” of air pollution at very high levels. However, with the knowledge we were able to collect, the health aspect of air pollution became clearer, and we saw how important it was not just to understand the episodes, but the same phenomena at comparatively lower levels, because even then there is an impact on health. With time the science and public health community realized this, and so air quality standards changed over time, alongside the research findings, to be more stringent and to focus on a day-to-day monitoring and reporting approach, as opposed to only looking at the extreme high-level episodes we researched initially. Looking at the peaks, it becomes clear how emission levels and meteorology combine to create these episodes but looking at air pollution in a day-in-day-out fashion, it’s just a different approach to controlling and lowering. A much more massive effort overall.

So as you worked on this, the philosophy changed, from looking at these “code red” types of days to looking at the daily levels in a permanent monitoring approach? 

That’s right. And so today, that’s how or why you see the air quality index alongside the other things that a meteorologist would typically cover. The measure of the index has also changed. What we now call “red” is something that when I started in the research, we would have not called red, because the orientation was around the extreme episodes of pollution. Over time, the research showed that even at that level we would have been considered as “low” back then, there were still health impacts that we just weren’t considering. We also started to think more about susceptible populations, not just the whole average population. For example, we started to look at, let’s say, children with asthma, and the impact was more, but there wasn’t much attention to those populations and their increased susceptibility, at the start. Policies began to become more informed about vulnerable populations, not just the general average whole and the broad issue of polluted air.

You can read our continued, full interview with Dr. Marcelo Korc here.