Welcome to the Department of Environmental Sciences
News & Events
Alumnus Feature
Zaina Merchant is featured by School of Engineering on her four-year journey in the Environmental Engineering program at Rutgers. Zaina has worked with Prof. Xiaomeng Jin on air quality and environmental justice. Zaina will be pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD in Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. See full story
Research Spotlight
Research has shown that clouds formed in polluted air masses contain a higher number of smaller cloud droplets compared to those formed in non-polluted areas, assuming other conditions are the same. These pollution-affected clouds reflect more sunlight back into space, resulting in cooler surface temperatures than clouds in cleaner environments. Smoke from forest fires and agricultural burning can drift over the Tropical Atlantic, but clouds in these smoky air masses do not reflect as much sunlight as theoretical models predict, thus they do not cool the ocean surface as much. Dr. Mark Miller, together with researchers from the Scripps Institute and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, have established that diminished cloud brightness results from heightened competition for available water vapor under conditions of significant pollution. Their research suggests there is an upper boundary to the quantity of sunlight that clouds within heavily polluted air masses can reflect. Competition response of cloud supersaturation explains diminished Twomey effect for smoky aerosol in the tropical Atlantic | PNAS
Alumnus Feature
Matthew T. Amato (Environmental Sciences, MS, 2019; PhD, 2023) is the 2024 recipient of the Soil Science Society of America’s Truog Soil Science Outstanding Dissertation Award. For more than 50 years, this prestigious award has been conferred annually to a recent PhD graduate whose dissertation has made a significant contribution to the field of soil science. The awardee is recognized during the society’s annual meeting, which this year took place in San Antonio, TX, during Nov. 10-13. For his dissertation, Dr. Amato developed a model from first principles to predict vertical distribution of fine roots (VRDs) and tested it successfully at 40 United States’ National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) sites. His work opens opportunities to improve Earth system models by predicting VRDs from global soil and climate information. Dr. Amato is currently a Water Resources Scientist at the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC). Prior to joining DRBC, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Riverside.
Alumnus Feature
Television weather forecaster Alex Calamia discusses the path that led him to his current position with News 12 Long Island. A New York native, Alex’s interest in weather dates back to childhood. He pursued this interest as a meteorology student at Rutgers, where he made and delivered weather forecasts in the WeatherWatcher TV studio and served as the daily observer at the weather station in Rutgers Gardens. He also worked with the Office of the New Jersey State Climatologist and participated in Prof. Steve Decker’s severe weather field trip. Alex graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in meteorology from SEBS in 2016.
Read More.
Alumnus Feature
Television weather forecaster Kelly Ann Cicalese shares the challenges of her work and what she loves most. The Sewaren, N.J., native who first developed an interest in weather in grade school, found her way to a career as a weather forecaster at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She started college as a math major, but after some guidance from her advisor, decided to apply her love of numbers and physics to a subject that she found most fascinating: meteorology. She graduated with a bachelor of science in the field in 2011.
Read More.
NOAA-funded air quality research
Xiaomeng Jin, assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences, is the co-principal investigator of a NOAA-funded study, published in Environmental Science & Technology. The new paper investigates the important air quality impacts of wildfires, and how new satellite instruments can elevate our understanding of those impacts. The new study is supported by the NOAA Climate Program Office’s Atmospheric Chemistry, Carbon Cycle and Climate (AC4) Program. See the full story here.
Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC) award
A team of researchers at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, including Professor Gedi Mainelis, has been selected to receive a $1 million Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC) award for a community-university partnership that combats climate change and improves access to essential resources and services. The Rutgers project, Smart Kids and Cool Seniors, seeks to assist low-resource urban residents as they adapt to increasing heat stress and local air pollution, both outdoors and indoors. Read about the project here
Rutgers Magazine recently featured the Meteorology Undergraduate Program, interviewing former and current students to help tell the story of what makes the program and its alumni successful. Read the article here.
4+1: Get your B.S. and M.S. degrees together in only five years!
Find out about 4+1 programs:
Meteorology/Atmospheric Science
Environmental Science
Bioenvironmental Engineering
Sunlight dissolved rocks on the early Earth
Professor Nathan Yee published a study in Science Advances showing that ultraviolet light from the Sun can dissolve the mineral pyrite. The new findings suggest that chemical elements released by this photochemical reaction was an important source of nutrients to the early biosphere. See the research article here: Anoxic photochemical weathering of pyrite on Archean continents
Rutgers Receives NOAA Honored Institution Awards for 125 Years of Service
NOAA’s National Weather Service has selected Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, as a recipient of the 2021 Honored Institution Awards for 125-Years’ Service for 125 years of distinguished service to the Nation through the Cooperative Observer Program (COOP program). Read more at the SEBS/NJAES Newsroom
The Department of Environmental Sciences is Awarded a 2020 Governor’s Environmental Excellence Award
The award ceremony was held on Monday, December 14, 2020. Here is the video of the acceptance speech delivered by Dr. Donna Fennell, Chair, Department of Environmental Sciences, for the NJ Governor's Environmental Excellence Award
DES Centennial Celebration
As part of the Centennial Celebration of the Department of Environmental Sciences (1920-2020), we convened a virtual symposium Environmental Research: The Next 100 Years. This symposium was held on six Fridays from Oct 2-Nov 13, 2020 and culminated with a virtual panel discussion, Past, Present and Future Trends in Environmental Issues on November 18th, 2020 at 7pm.
In conjunction with its centennial, the Department of Environmental Sciences is offering items through All Colors with the new Centennial logo for purchase. Click here for the Centennial Store. Thank you!
Weather Radar on Our Campus!
Visitors from NBC Universal joined faculty and students from SEBS and
the Meteorology Undergraduate Program to celebrate the new weather radar
on our campus. This celebration was featured on WNBC as shown here.
Storm Chasers!
Students experienced a 3-credit course taught by Steve Decker. The "Severe Weather Field Trip" was featured on Rutgers Focus. The "storm chasers" could predict, observe, and analyze storms understanding the dynamics and thermodynamics leading to some of the most beautiful yet complex atmospheric circulations on Earth.
