CHEE Grad Student Discusses NASA Mission on Thesis Thursdays

Every Thursday, Tucson radio station KXCI 91.3 interviews graduate students about their research and interests on a program called Thesis Thursdays. Recently, the show featured Kira Zeider a first-year graduate student and Herbold Fellow pursuing her chemical engineering doctorate. 

A Tucson native, Zeider graduated from the University of Arizona in May 2020 with two bachelor’s degrees in chemical and environmental engineering. She currently works under CHEE professor Armin Sorooshian on several projects, including the major NASA mission Aerosol Cloud Meteorology Interactions Over the Western Atlantic Experiment, or ACTIVATE.

"Aerosol research is an emerging field, so there's a lot of work to be done to understand all the properties of aerosols and the ways they affect our environment," Zeider said. "This campaign is looking into interactions between aerosol particles and clouds, which are the largest uncertainty in the simulation of climate. So, for this expedition, we're obtaining one of the largest aircraft data sets that's ever been generated."