May 3, 2024
Teague McCracken, an undergraduate student majoring in biosystems engineering at Clemson University, recently published his study titled “Quantifying the impacts of Canadian wildfires on regional air pollution networks” in Science of The Total Environment, a high-impact journal in the environmental sciences field. Teague is motivated by the nexus of biological systems and artificial intelligence; he aims to apply his education to develop solutions that increase sustainability and address global challenges such as climate change and agriculture. In the Fall of 2022, Dr. Chao Fan’s special topic course titled “Artificial Intelligence for Climate Adaptation” was a natural fit for Teague’s research interests. It was during this course that the two formed a partnership which led to Dr. Fan hiring Teague as an undergraduate research assistant upon the conclusion of the course. Through the school’s TIGER Grant program, the two worked closely to develop a research direction and project.
Air pollution is a major driver of health issues around the world and often amplifies inequalities present in cities. Predictive models have become very useful for forecasting air pollution levels and creating hyperlocal (street-by-street scale) maps of air pollution. The key to these models’ utility is their accuracy. Wildfires are disruptive events that change typical air pollution patterns, patterns that predictive models are trained on. This dynamic leads to a drop in the accuracy of predictive models during extreme pollution events when predictions are most important. Teague’s study expands a method for quantifying relative air pollution patterns called air pollution correlation networks and, for the first time, tests the impacts of wildfires on these networks.
Through this research, Teague and Dr. Fan prove that air pollution correlation networks can capture the impacts of wildfires on air pollution patterns. Teague presented this work with an oral presentation at the annual American Geophysical Union conference (AGU23) in San Francisco, CA this past December. This is one of the largest conferences in earth and space sciences and allowed him to share their work widely. This study paves the way for future research to improve air pollution prediction models. The two aim to improve strategies for preventing, mitigating, and adapting to pollution exposure, an issue that has escalated into a significant global health challenge.
We are all very proud of Teague and Dr. Fan! Teague also recently won the CECAS J. Wesley Davis Leadership Award for outstanding contributions to a student organization and excellent scholarship. Learn more . . .
