Work
General
I've been working since 1992 at
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
(which is not the same as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). I've worked on indoor radon
(a naturally occurring radioactive gas) and on indoor airflow (with applications to protecting buildings
from chemical or biological attack). I've also done some work on statistical methods and data analysis
methods, for analyzing data with various unusual features. I became a Fellow of the American Statistical
Society in 2003.
Indoor Airflow
Since 1999, my group, the
airflow and pollutant transport group
has been working on predicting airflow within, into, and out of, buildings.
This work suddenly became more relevant, or at least more urgent, due to
anthrax attacks and terrorism in the U.S. in late 2001. Some of my group's
advice related to these issues can be found at
the "secure buildings" website.
Radon
Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas that can reach dangerous
concentrations indoors. Although much over-hyped by the EPA, it
really is a danger to a small fraction of people in the U.S. My
first project involved several aspects of radon prediction and mapping,
such as determining how effectively various types of geologic information
can be used to predict radon concentrations. If you want, you can
see whether I think you should check your house for radon: my friend
Andrew Gelman and I put together a
web site to make a recommendation
based on information about your house and your risk tolerance.
The radon research got me involved in various other issues, leading
to publications on issues such as: how to incorporate uncertainties
when performing cost-benefit analyses; misleading characteristics
inherent in maps of parameter estimates; and including spatial information
in statistical models.
Computed tomography of gases in air
If you shine a beam of infrared light through the air, pollutants
in the air will absorb some of it. Different gases absorb different
wavelengths of light. The amount of absorption at a given wavelength
can tell you how much of a given gas (methane, say) is present along
the light beam.
If you measure along a bunch of different beams (e.g., a bunch
of intersecting beams) then it is sometimes possible to deduce the
spatial distribution of the gas that gives rise to the resulting
absorption measurements. That is, if you know the total amount of
gas along each path, you can sometimes figure out how the gas must
be arranged in space. The process of determining a spatial distribution
from a bunch of path integrals is called computed tomography.
You might be familiar with it from the medical technique called
CAT scans, which just stands for Computer Aided Tomography. Anyway,
some colleagues and I invented a new method of solving the mathematical
problems that arise in computed tomography, that work for the particular
type of distributions that come up in gas concentrations in air.
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