Keynote Speakers

Sophie Szopa
Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, France

Sophie Szopa is an atmospheric chemist at the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement. She uses numerical models to study how chemistry intervenes in the modification of the composition of the atmosphere and how this affects climate and air quality. She carried out work on these various current environmental issues, before becoming interested in the role of this chemistry in the distant past of the Earth. She has been involved in the assessment of knowledge of the physical bases of climate change for the IPCC (AR6) and coordinated a chapter on short-lived chemical compounds acting on the climate. She participated in the drafting of the Summary for Policymakers of this report and its approval by governments. She is currently vice-president of the University Paris-Saclay, in charge of sustainable development.

Chak K. Chan
Division of Physical Science and Engineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

His major research interests include aerosol chemistry and air pollution. His current research interest focuses on gas-particle interactions, in particular, the thermodynamics and hygroscopic properties of atmospheric aerosols, as well as heterogeneous reactions related to the formation of secondary air pollutants. His research involves both field studies (e.g. mechanisms of sampling artifacts of semi-volatile species in aerosols, size distributions of ionic (inorganic and organic) species, aerosol acidity) and laboratory experiments using single particle levitation technique, an oxidation flow reactor, aerosol laser spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. He was the Project Manager of the HKUST Air Quality Research Supersite for the real-time characterization of ambient aerosols from 2009 to 2015.  More recently, he has worked on primary emissions and the formation of secondary organic aerosols of cooking emissions, reactive uptake of organics, and heterogeneous reactions in the formation of secondary aerosols.

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James Crawford
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, USA

James Crawford received his B.S. in Mathematics from the United States Military Academy in 1986 and his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1997. Since that time, he has been a research scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center. From the start of his graduate studies in 1991 and throughout his career, his research has been associated with airborne field studies conducted across the globe by NASA’s Tropospheric Chemistry Program and collaborating partners. His interests include the photochemistry of tropospheric ozone and free radicals, the global budget of reactive nitrogen, the influence of clouds on trace gas transport and chemistry, and the use of satellites to study long-range pollution transport and air quality. Most recently, he has served as the principal investigator for an air quality-focused field study (DISCOVER-AQ) aimed at improving the diagnosis of surface air quality conditions from satellite observations. He currently serves as the Atmospheric Chemistry Editor for the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres. He was also co-lead of the IGAC/SPARC joint activity on Atmospheric Composition and the Asian Monsoon (ACAM).

Suvarna Fadnavis
Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology

Suvarna Fadnavis is a senior scientist at the Center for Climate Change Research at the Indian Institute of Tropical Metrology, Pune, India. She is the recipient of WMO’s International Nobert-Gerbier Mumm Award for the year 2005. She is a steering committee member of (1) Stratospheric Sulfur and its Role in Climate (SSiRC), a SPARC program and (2) Chemistry-Climate Model Initiative (CCMI) an IGAC program. She is an Editor of the Journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Frontiers in Environmental Science, atmosphere and climate section. She has published more than 100 papers in international Journals.
Her research is focused on the Asian summer monsoon, Chemistry climate modeling of anthropogenic, volcanic aerosols and trace gases. Her recent publications focus on factors influencing climate change over India, linkages of Indian droughts with volcanic and anthropogenic aerosols, stratospheric intrusions and weather over India, impact of Asian pollution on the Himalayas glaciers melting and runoff etc., dynamical processes associated with the monsoon anticyclone, transport of pollutants into the lower stratosphere by monsoon convection, pollution transport from Asia to the Arctic and their impacts on the Arctic surface temperature.