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Clearing the Air
 Julian Marshall enjoying the fresh air near
Vancouver, B.C.Ozone, benzene, and diesel exhaust are chemicals polluting city air and swirling around Julian Marshall’s research world. A first-year assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, Marshall is examining air quality in urban settings with the hope that his work will eventually have us all breathing easier.
Marshall is the first air pollution specialist to join the department’s environmental engineering section. He is a graduate of the innovative Energy and Resources group at University of California Berkeley and brings with him research experience from California, Canada, and Indonesia.
Nightly news broadcasts may highlight how countries like China are belching toxic smoke into the air, but Marshall knows the United States is not immune to the problem. “We’re breathing in pollution as we sit here,” he points out. The problem stems largely from cars, trucks and buses racing about our cities and dirtying the air from coast to coast.
Marshall says that even in less-polluted cities like Minneapolis, air pollution causes a measurable reduction in public health. Given all of this, he’s devoting his research to analyzing urban air pollution, with an emphasis on transportation sources and their health impacts.
Marshall uses a unique equation when analyzing how urban air pollution sources affect people. “I think about the health impacts from each source as the product of three terms: emission, intake fraction, and toxicity,” said Marshall. In other words, he considers the amount of emissions; how much of it we breathe, and how bad it is for our health. The middle and easily most esoteric term – intake fraction – is what currently interests Marshall most.
In essence, intake fraction is the ratio of inhaled emissions versus the total amount present in the atmosphere. For example, an intake fraction of 10 per million, means people inhale 10 grams of pollution for every million grams released into the air. Marshall thinks paying greater attention to what people actually breathe in, as is done when calculating intake fractions, will help show how laws can be adjusted to better protect our health.
Doctorate in hand, Marshall is bringing his unique perspective and experience on transportation pollution into University classrooms. “I enjoy teaching,” said Marshall. “It’s fun interacting with students.”
What’s more, the professor is also showing his students how their personal decisions can influence the quality of both life and air. “A class I’m teaching now is called ‘Technologies for Sustainable Societies’,” said Marshall. Throughout the course, he’s challenging students to consider how modern advances designed to serve society can help or hinder our ability to protect the environment and preserve resources.
Outside the classroom, Marshall finds the scientific diversity of the University offers an exciting opportunity to share research. “This is a large university doing a lot of top quality work, so there are people in many other areas who I can collaborate with,” said Marshall. “The people are nice here and the faculty get along really well with each other.”
Marshall has begun research looking at not just the causes of urban air pollution, but also their cure. “One of the topics I’m interested in is urban planning,” said Marshall. With traffic congestion worsening and commutes getting longer, people are returning to cities to be closer to the places where they work, shop and live. He suspects this metropolitan migration is a chance for urban designers to make cities better for walking and cycling. The possibility has him wondering if urban air pollution would be reduced in cities designed for such activities.
If so, before long Marshall’s research could help clear the way for Americans to pedal or stroll to work without seeing a dingy yellow-tinted sky or fanning away stinky diesel exhaust Now that would be a breath of fresh air indeed.
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