The O'Brien Group
Past Members of the O'Brien Group
William & Mary alumni
Emily Legaard
M.S. Chemistry, College of William & Mary, 2022
Emily characterized an Indoor Surface Extractor for solvent extraction of indoor surface films. Advanced mass spectrometry techniques will be applied to characterize the organic mixtures.
Claire Robinson
M.S. Chemistry, College of William & Mary
Claire worked with AMS data sets from NASA flights.
Laurel Nicks
M.S. Chemistry, College of William & Mary, 2023
Laurel worked with aged vs. fresh aerosol samples.
Aron Jaffe
Chemistry Undergraduate
Class of 2022
Aron worked on autoxidiation in large molecules in films and helped with longer term photolysis experiments.
Monica Dibley
Chemistry Undergraduate
Class of 2022
Monica worked with material deposited onto outdoor surfaces, including the complex mixtures found in dew water.
Chris Chan
Chemistry Undergraduate
Class of 2024
Chris worked with indoor surface samples to characterize the chemicals present in both fresh and aged mixtures
Natalie Warren
Chemistry Undergraduate
Class of 2022
Natalie worked with brown carbon aerosol particles from FIREX.
Marley Adamek
Chemistry Undergraduate
Class of 2022
Marley worked with brown carbon aerosol particles from Toluene SOA under high NOx conditions.
Yousuf Barekzay
Chemistry Undergraduate
Class of 2023
Yousuf worked with material deposited on indoor surfaces, especially after human activities like cooking and cleaning.
Churchill Wilkinson
Chemistry Undergraduate
Class of 2024
Churchill worked on computational modeling of the gas-phase vibrational spectra for organic molecules that are relevant for atmospheric chemistry
Hannah Przelomski
M.S. Chemistry, College of William & Mary
Hannah helped build an Indoor Surface Extractor for solvent extraction of indoor surface films.
Lemai Vo
Chemistry Undergraduate
Class of 2021
Lemai worked with photolysis of brown carbon formed in the laboratory through reactions between ammonium and methyl glyoxal.
Gloria Ge
Chemistry Undergraduate
Class of 2021
Gloria worked with organic material found indoors with a focus on exposure to pets in the home. She is headed to Vet. school at Cornell.
Corey Thrasher
Chemistry Undergraduate
Class of 2021
Corey made secondary organic aerosol from α-pinene ozonolysis and compared photodegredation effects in aqueous solutions vs. dry aerosol films. Corey is now headed to graduate school at John's Hopkins in Chemistry
Julia Mesawich
Biology Undergraduate
Class of 2020
Julia is working on indoor surface film extraction and characterization of both organic and biological compounds.
Daphne Sink
Chemistry Undergraduate
Class of 2020
Daphnie is preparing and characterizing aerosol extracts from SPARTAN filters for analysis with soft-ionization mass spectrometry.
Hongmin Yu
Chemistry Undergraduate
Class of 2020
Daphnie is preparing and characterizing aerosol extracts from SPARTAN filters for analysis with soft-ionization mass spectrometry.
Lydia Dolvin
Chemistry Undergraduate
Class of 2020
Lydia studied the kinetics of photobleaching for brown carbon in cloud water proxies.
Emma Q. Walhout
B.S. Chemistry, College of William and Mary, 2017
M.S. Chemistry, College of William and Mary, 2019
Emma works for Charles River Laboratories as a Research Specialist for validation of pre-clinical drug discovery.
At William and Mary she modeled the IR spectra of α-pinene secondary organic aerosol products for comparison with infrared action spectra. She also analyzed the composition changes that occur during photolysis of α-pinene SOA at low RH.
Jacob Shusterman
Chemistry Undergraduate
Class of 2019
Jacob generated aerosol samples for the brown carbon and SOA photolysis projects to simulate real cloud water samples.
William Perrine
Biology Undergraduate
Class of 2019
William investigated the photobleaching rate of brown carbon in cloud water proxies using UV/VIS.
Michael Ambrose
Biology Undergraduate
Class of 2019
Michael investigated the photobleaching rate of brown carbon in cloud water proxies using UV/VIS.
Becca Merriman-Goldring
Chemistry Undergraduate
Class of 2019
Becca investigated the ozone degradation of pigments using mass spectrometry and surface enhanced raman (SERs) in collaboration with the Wustholtz group.
Tanner Braman
Chemistry Major Undergraduate
Class of 2020
Tanner is investigating the photobleaching rate of brown carbon in cloud water proxies using UV/VIS.
Past group photos
2021-2022
(William & Mary)
2020-2021
(William & Mary)
Not pictured: Gloria Ge, Erin Tweed
2019-2020
(William & Mary)
Not pictured: Corey Thrasher, Aron Jaffe, Yang Zhang, and Natalie Warren
2019-2020
(William & Mary)
Not pictured: Corey Thrasher, Aron Jaffe, Yang Zhang, and Natalie Warren