This week we welcome back Dr. Delphine Farmer of the University of Colorado at Boulder and HomeChem fame. Dr. Farmer was one of our guests at the HomeChem open house back on 6 -22-2018. This week we will provide update on HomeChem and get Dr. Farmer’s thoughts indoor vs outdoor air: cooking, cleaning and COVID. We will discuss the chemistry of indoor environments and then talk about the experiments many schools and others are performing on indoor air quality without realizing it.

 

Delphine Farmer, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on building new instrumentation to measure reactive trace gases and particles in the atmosphere in order to understand how humans are changing our environment. She is particularly interested in the emissions from forests, and has recently taken the dive into the complex world of indoor chemistry.

 

Dr. Farmer grew up in Canada, and received her BSc in Chemistry from McGill University in Montreal. She moved to warmer climates to earn her Master’s in Environmental Science, Policy and Management and her PhD in Chemistry, both from the University of California at Berkeley. Her research focused on using laser spectroscopy to study forest-atmosphere interactions. Delphine then held a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Colorado Boulder, working with aerosol mass spectrometers in forests in the Brazilian Amazon and California’s Sierra Nevada mountains.