When
Monday, February 16, 2026, 10:00 a.m.
Jon Abbatt
Professor
Department of Chemistry
University of Toronto
"It Is All Around Us: The Chemistry of Indoor Environments"
Harshbarger 118A-A1
ABSTRACT: North Americans spend about 90% of their time indoors, where they receive the majority of their non-dietary chemical exposure. While indoor air quality has frequently been studied from a building science perspective, recent findings over the past decade have illustrated the complex and sometimes surprising chemistry that occurs indoors. In particular, many chemicals that are emitted indoors, for example from smoking or cooking, undergo chemical transformations before being ventilated away or removed via cleaning. Many of the reactive transformations are driven by oxidants commonly encountered in the outdoor environment, such as ozone, leading to oxidation products of unknown toxicity. Humans play a very important role in driving indoor chemistry by not only adding oxidants, such as cleaning agents, but also being the sites for reactive chemistry themselves. This talk will present a suite of laboratory experiments and field measurements conducted in genuine indoor environments that illustrate the chemistry that is occurring all around us.
BIOSKETCH: Jon Abbatt obtained his PhD in atmospheric chemistry from Harvard, conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, and then taught at University of Chicago as both an assistant and associate professor. He moved to the University of Toronto in 2000 where he is now a full professor leading a research group that conducts both laboratory and field research. He has a particular interest in the many roles of aerosol particles in the atmosphere, and in multiphase chemistry that goes on between gases and condensed phases. He has studied chemistry related to stratospheric ozone, Arctic processes, and cloud formation, with current research interests in wildfire and indoor chemistry. Jon is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Royal Society of Canada.