Achievement

IGERT Trainee Lindsay Graham (Psychology) teamed with trainees Erin Darling (Environmental Engineering) and Affiliate Meng Ke (Environmental Engineering) to complete seminal research on how personality traits and emotions affect actions that influence indoor air quality. In particularly, they showed that differences in basic emotions between individuals affect indoor space and product choices that in turn affect sources of ultrafine particles emitted from aromatherapy products, as well as secondary organic aerosols formed from indoor chemistry when certain mood-altering consumer products (e.g., scenting agents, ionizers) are used. Their efforts provide important knowledge relevant to analyses of population exposures to ultrafine particles. In addition to stimulating a new interdisciplinary research area (a follow-up study is underway), their work led to two refereed conference publications during the past year.