Congratulations to Sarah Bliese, who is one of two recipients of the 2017 Naughton Graduate Fellowship.  Working in the Chemistry lab of Prof. Marya Lieberman in South Bend, USA and with the Sensor Materials group of Prof. Aoiffe Morrin in Dublin,Ireland, her goal is to develop the airMAP, a scalable sensor system for monitoring air pollutants in low resource settings.

This project is a collaboration between UND and DCU that is designed to address air pollution monitoring infrastructure for low resource settings. We propose to develop sensor pods for measuring air quality, but since these are expensive devices, the sensor pods will be used to dynamically calibrate paper analytical devices (PADs) that change colors in the presence of low levels of air pollutants. By imaging the colors on the cards with a cell phone camera, concentrations of several air pollutants at a particular place and time can be captured and reported via the mobile phone network. The resulting monitoring system will combine continuously operating sentinel sites and the capacity to quickly gather large quantities of environmental data across an entire city or region through "crowd-sourcing".