Environmental pollution and resource use remain major challenges for human health, ecosystems, and long-term sustainability. The Sustainable and Environmental Engineering Laboratory (SEEL) investigates these challenges through interdisciplinary research focused on understanding pollutant sources, environmental transformations, exposure pathways, and engineering strategies for mitigation.

Our research spans air quality, atmospheric chemistry, aerosols, emerging contaminants, transportation and aerospace emissions, environmental monitoring, and sustainable engineering systems. We are particularly interested in how pollutants are generated, transported, transformed, and ultimately affect communities and the environment. This includes studying atmospheric particles and gases, secondary pollutant formation, community-scale air quality, and emissions associated with rapidly evolving technologies and infrastructure.

A central component of SEEL’s mission is to connect environmental characterization with sustainability and resilience. Our work examines not only how pollutants can be measured and controlled, but also how engineering decisions influence energy use, resource consumption, environmental justice, climate impacts, and long-term system performance. By integrating environmental monitoring with sustainability assessment, we seek to identify solutions that reduce pollution without simply shifting impacts from one environmental medium, location, or stage of a system’s life cycle to another.

To address complex environmental challenges, the SEEL Research Group relies on an integrated combination of laboratory experiments, field measurements, data analysis, and modeling techniques. These approaches are complemented by advanced chemical and aerosol characterization, low-cost sensing, community air quality monitoring, and machine-learning methods, allowing us to investigate environmental systems across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales.

Ultimately, SEEL aims to advance engineering solutions that improve air and environmental quality, protect human health, support resilient communities, and promote more sustainable technologies and systems.