Upcoming Harmful Algal Bloom Study

Ault Lab graduate students Nicole Olson and Jia Shi and Prof. Ault traveled to Grand Lake St. Mary's to visit the site for our upcoming harmful algal bloom study. We performed preliminary measurements to analyze the freshwater for blue green algae content and pH. We will spend a week in early August at Wright State University collecting freshwater and aerosol particles to determine if harmful algal bloom toxins are aerosolized on this lake. Stay tuned for some very exciting results next month!

Graduate students Nicole Olson and Jia Shi scouting sampling locations. 

Jia and Nicole performing preliminary measurements. 

Prof. Ault, Nicole, and Jia smiling after a successful day. Looking forward to sampling in August!

IEPOXALYPSE Round 2 Field Study

This summer, Ault's lab and Surratt's lab had another summer field study at the University of North Carolina, Chaple Hill. This field study is very successful and productive, many interesting stories about the IEPOXALYPSE are coming!

Most highlight of this field study is having hard work and a fantastic crew of students & postdocs, who have put lots of effort into this field study. Lead students were Ziying (Nancy) Lei from our group & Yuzhi Chen from UNC, along with Madeline from UM and postdoc Yue Zhang from UNC.


May 28th, Nancy and Madeline with help from Nicole, Jia, Yao, Kim loaded ATOFMS, impactors, etc. With Professor Ault, we started our road trip!

We stopped at Cincinnati on the way and had a great time with Helene Ault and Bruce Ault, they made an amazing dinner! 

We had a kickoff dinner at the beginning of the campaign. We were so excited to work with Jason's UNC team, Yuzhi & Yue!

We were appreciative of some help from Jamy in the PrattLab at Michigan helping Madeline get the ATOFMS optimized in the field.

After a series of experiments, we had a great mid-study meeting to assess our data so far and plan out our experiments for the second half of the study led by Nancy Lei and Yuzhi Chen.

We were also joined by Ault Lab postdoc and summer undergrad Isabel Ledsky from Chemistry Department at Carleton College

After a final few experiments that ran deep into the night, we packed up our instruments and headed back to Michigan. Excited to be back and with tons of good data to analyze! Way to go team IEPOXALYPSE!