the Bates lab

Welcome

to the Bates Lab @ CU Boulder Mechanical & Environmental Engineering! We use a variety of scientific techniques to study the chemical processes by which organic molecules in the atmosphere contribute to air pollution. Here you can learn more about our lab members and our research or browse our recent publications and presentations. We're actively recruiting motivated students & researchers – if you're interested in joining the lab as a graduate student, undergraduate, or postdoc, please reach out!

News

2/27/26 - today group members Andre, Maria, and Raphael present their work at the second annual AQ Buffs student-led air quality symposium!

2/18/26 - new co-authored paper alert! Kelvin's odd-oxygen budgeting in GEOS-Chem also came in handy for this one: "Large and increasing stratospheric contribution to tropospheric ozone over East Asia" by Nadia Colombi (Harvard), out now in ACP.

2/16/26 - new co-authored paper alert! "Aerosol iodine recycling is a major control on tropospheric reactive iodine abundance" by Alli Moon (U. Washington), for which Kelvin helped with model interpretation and implementation of odd-oxygen budgeting, was just published in ACP.

1/1/26 - happy new year and welcome to the lab Dr. Emmaline Longnecker! Emmy will be helping to set up our new mass spectrometer and using it to investigate the chemistry of PFAS compounds in the air.

12/25/25 - Merry Christmas and happy new co-authored paper alert: "Wintertime Peroxyacetyl Nitrate (PAN) Hotspot over China Observed from Space: Interpretation of CrIS Results Using Updated GEOS-Chem" by Peng Zhang (SUSTech) was just published in ES&T Letters!

12/19/25 - congrats to group member Raphael Odai, whose collaboration with researchers from the University of Copenhagen studying the photolysis of organic sulfur compounds in the atmosphere was just published in J. Phys. Chem. A!

12/18/25 - check out this writeup on the indoor air quality measurement campaign we participate in last summer! The CLEAN Home campaign was a collaborative effort across CU's Mechanical Engineering, Environmental Engineering, & Chemistry departments, as well as the local NCAR lab, and our group member Andre helped run an iodide CIMS during the project.

12/17/25 - happy holidays from Honolulu, HI, where Kelvin is presenting our group's recent work characterizing the vaporization inlet for aerosols (VIA) at the Pacifichem conference.

11/30/25 - new co-authored paper alert: "Ammonia Observations Over Large North American Cities" by Emily Lill (Colorado State), which uses measurements of VOCs from the AEROMMA campaign that Kelvin helped collect, was just published in JGR-Atmos.

11/28/25 - new co-authored paper alert: "The global importance of gas-phase peroxy radical accretion reactions for secondary organic aerosol loading" by Alife Mayhew (U Utah) is out now in ACP. For this one, Kelvin helped with the implementation of new organic gas-phase oxidation mechanisms in GEOS-Chem.

11/27/25 - happy Thanksgiving and a big congrats to group member Andre Schaum on his newly published manuscript in Aerosol Research describing a novel method of coupling liquid chromatography to chemical ionization mass spectrometry for offline analysis of organic aerosol!

10/7/25 - huge thanks to Prof. Lelia Hawkins at Harvey Mudd for hosting Kelvin on a visit to the College's Hixon Climate Center! Today he'll guest lecture in a first-year chemistry course and then present a research seminar on "Changing Sources of Atmospheric Organics: Impacts from Local to Global Scales".

8/21/25 - happy first day of classes, and welcome to the lab Kate, Rodrigo, & Max! This semester Prof. Bates is teaching two courses: Climate Engineering and Chemistry for Energy & Material Science.

8/7/25 - new co-authored paper alert: "Atmospheric Evolution of Brown Carbon from Wildfires in North America" by Jhao-Hong Chen (WashU St. Louis) is out now in ES&T. This study uses observations of VOCs from the AEROMMA campaign that Kelvin helped collect.

8/5/25 - Kelvin is presenting today at the Gordon Research Conference on Atmospheric Chemistry (his favorite conference) in Sunday River, Maine -- "How Much Detail Is Enough? Model Mechanisms of Monoterpenes, Sesquiterpenes, and Cooking Aldehydes".

7/2/25 - that's a wrap! We've finished up a six-week deployment to Prof. Nina Vance's garage to measure indoor air quality. Kelvin & Andre got very good at cooking pasta and meat sauce by a strict recipe to investigate emissions of particles and gases in the kitchen.

7/1/25 - new co-authored paper alert! "Sources, Sinks, and Oxidation Pathways of Phenolic Compounds in South Korea Constrained Using KORUS-AQ Airborne Observations" by Stephen MacFarlane (U Wollongong) is out now in JGR-Atmos.

6/24/25 - new co-authored paper alert! "Ozone Production Efficiencies in the Three Largest United States Cities from Airborne Measurements" by Wyndom Chace (CU Boulder, Chemistry) is out now in ES&T! This study uses observations of VOCs from the AEROMMA campaign that Kelvin helped collect.

5/15/25 - we're all set up in Prof. Nina Vance's garage to measure indoor air quality as part of the CLEAN Home campaign this summer! Thanks to Dr. Qing Ye at NCAR for collaborating on the deployment of an iodide CIMS for this project.

5/1/25 - Prof. Bates won a teaching award! The "Best Should Teach" awards recognize CU faculty who "embody the beliefs, behaviors, and skills of exemplary teachers".

4/18/25 - congrats to the student organizers of the (first annual) AQ Buffs symposium for putting together an excellent day of air quality talks & posters!

4/10/25 - new co-authored paper alert! "Dimethyl sulfide chemistry over the industrial era: comparison of key oxidation mechanisms and long-term observations" by Ursula Jongebloed (U Washington) is out now in ACP.

3/27/25 - new co-authored paper alert! "Ethanol and Methanol in South Korea and China: Evidence for Large Anthropogenic Emissions Missing from Current Inventories" by Ellie Beaudry (Harvard) is out now in ES&T Air.

3/4/25 - new co-authored paper alert! "Assessment of Hydrogen's Climate Impact Is Affected by Model OH Biases" by Laura Yang (Harvard) is out now in GRL.

2/21/25 - new co-authored paper alert! "Advances in an OH reactivity instrument for airborne field measurements" is out now in AMT.

8/19/24 - It's the first day of school again - today I start my appointment as an assistant professor in CU's Mechanical Engineering Department!

7/14/24 - We're off on another round of field measurements, this time to Salt Lake City as part of NOAA's Utah Summer Ozone Study (USOS) Campaign. I'll be running the proton transfer reaction (PTR) mass spectrometer aboard our mobile lab as we drive around the Salt Lake Valley.

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