Monica A. Mazurek is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and is a member of the Center for Advanced Infrastructure & Transportation (CAIT). Her research has focused on carbonaceous aerosols, their sources, and impacts on local, regional, and global air quality.
She obtained her B.S. Chemistry and Ph.D. in Geochemistry from the University of California at Los Angeles and was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Environmental Engineering Science Department at the California Institute of Technology. Before joining Rutgers University she was a Research Chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the Division of Environmental Chemistry and served as an Associate Program Director for the Atmospheric Chemistry Program, at the National Science Foundation.
Her research interests include air quality engineering; alternative fuels and transportation; interactions of carbonaceous aerosols and the global hydrologic cycle; radiative effects of black carbon deposition; sustainability engineering; chemical compositions, sources, distributions; and fates of carbonaceous aerosol particles; analytical methods for organic compounds in environmental media; and biogeochemical engineering. She has co-authored 47 peer reviewed publications in international atmospheric chemistry and environmental science and engineering journals.
Mazurek teaches environmental engineering, and undergraduate and graduate courses in hydrology. She incorporates ESRI ArcGIS mapping and analysis of watersheds into course work and draws Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) into the understanding of how the Earth’s energy budget impacts the hydrologic cycle. Key interactions involving energy transfer from the tropical ocean to increased intensity of hurricanes and cyclones are discussed in terms of the molecular and themodynamic properties of water. She currently is directing the project River M.D.: Assessing the Health of the Raritan River, involving Rutgers undergraduate students and the Dept. of Marine and Coastal Sciences. Here, students are engaged in research that gathers time-series measurements of dissolved oxygen, pH, salinity, and temperature of the Raritan River using the R/V Rutgers. The project gives students an early introduction to climate change research that is connected to surface water resources.
Dr. Mazurek received the 2001 Haagen-Smit Award and the 2007 Haagen-Smit Award for papers she co-authored on molecular composition, modeling, and source attribution of atmospheric fine particles. The award recognizes benchmark contributions to atmospheric chemistry and air quality research. She is a member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which along with Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr., share in two equal parts the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
Publications:
Rodríguez, Isatis & Leidman, Sasha & Rennermalm, Asa & Mazurek, Monica. (2017). Measurement of black carbon and its impact over Greenland Ice Sheet from 2016 to 2017.
