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

LinkedIn 

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


2018-2019

2017- 2018