Air Date: 2-14-25 | Episode 749
This week we welcome Dr. Delphine Farmer from the Colorado State University to talk about the current science on wildfires. Dr. Farmer and her team started looking closely at this topic after the Marshall fires three years ago, when a wind-driven wildfire raced through two communities just outside Boulder, Colorado.
Delphine Farmer, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on understanding the air we breathe both indoors and out, and how the chemistry of air impacts human health, ecosystems, and even climate. Her recent work has focused on wildfire smoke, starting with aircraft projects flying in large wildfire plumes, and more recently looking at how smoke interacts with building surfaces.
Dr. Farmer grew up in Canada, and received her BSc in Chemistry from McGill University in Montreal. She moved to warmer climates to earn her Master’s in Environmental Science, Policy and Management and her PhD in Chemistry, both from the University of California at Berkeley. Her research focused on forest-atmosphere interactions. Delphine then held a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Colorado Boulder, working with aerosol mass spectrometers in forests in the Brazilian Amazon and California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. She started making indoor measurements with the HOMEChem project and has extended her indoor work to the NIST test house in Maryland and offices at Colorado State.
