Flying with a fabric poster is the best.
Author: Grace Li | Major: Chemical Engineering, German | Semester: Spring 2025
Nitrogen dioxide and ozone are both EPA Criteria Air Pollutants in the troposphere, largely generated by combustion and therefore present in significant concentrations in urban areas. Sunlight facilitates chemical reactions between pollutants and ambient air. Aerosols modulate the amount of available energy required to drive such photochemical reactions, ultimately impacting air quality. I used the software FastJX to simulate the effects of atmospheric aerosols on these reactions.
I went to the American Meteorological Society Conference to present my poster, as this is their largest annual conference, and I wanted to connect with other students and professionals in atmospheric science and meteorology. I spoke to a few students about their experiences at their home institutions and connected with organizations such as NASA and NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research. This provided a few possible leads for graduate school and postgraduate work.
The poster session itself was fun and gave me an opportunity to refine my explanation of my work. Poster presentations are so much shorter and more interactive than an oral presentation, and I enjoyed the casual format. Walking around the convention hall browsing the other posters was also a nice way to catch up with other students and learn about research in a wide spread of topics. I met a student from Michigan State University who worked on a project characterizing unusual thunderstorms in the Midwest. My air quality research occurs on a much smaller scale and timeframe than these meteorological phenomena, so I had much to learn.
In addition to the poster session, I went to a great workshop about open science. We discussed the shift towards data transparency in philosophical and practical terms. I agreed with open science in concept before this workshop, but I didn’t know how to implement it in my own practice. For example, while GitHub is incredibly useful for sharing code and files, it doesn’t assign digital object identifiers, which are necessary for stability in open science. As a result, I will now be using Zenodo in conjunction with GitHub.
This conference was helpful in allowing me to present my research to an audience with more field-specific expertise. I would recommend attending the right conference alone over attending a poorly-fitting conference with a group. It may initially feel awkward, but these conferences are all for connecting with new people. I had a conversation with a computer science student from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte about getting into our respective research projects while studying different subjects. I would also weed out the agenda before arriving at the conference; this saved me from the headache of deciding when and where to go on the fly.
My next step is wrapping up this research project with a final poster presentation at the University of Arkansas in April. The next iteration of my poster will include the work I have accomplished in the Fall 2024 semester, which came too late to be included in the design of my existing poster. This project will also serve as my undergraduate honors thesis, so I will be writing in addition to designing presentation slides and a new poster.