Swiss Aerosol Award 2022 for Nadine Karlen

For her work on the DustEar project, Nadine Karlen of the ISE received the Swiss Aerosol Award 2022, one of the most important Swiss awards for aerosol researchers. Nadine Karlen was a Master student at the ISE and now works as a research associate at the ISE.

The team of Prof. Dr. Ernest Weingartner and Nadine Karlen has proven the principle of measuring aerosol particles with an “impactor” with a demonstrator in the DustEar project. This allows the detection of liquid and solid particles with a minimum mass of 50 picograms or a few micrometers in size. For this purpose, the particles are accelerated in a nozzle and hit a piezoelectric sensor. The DustEar project has already been introduced in a previous blog post.

The Swiss Aerosol Group of the Swiss Lung League acknowledges that this new, innovative approach allows an accurate characterization of the mass distribution and thus the particle mass concentration such as. PM10 or PM2.5 is made possible. These are regulated parameters in air quality monitoring. In addition, the measured mass distribution provides important information on aerosol sources and types – this is important for studying the effectiveness of measures to reduce air pollution.

We congratulate Nadine Karlen for this great award!

Contacts: Nadine Karlen, nadine.karlen@fhnw.ch, Prof. Dr. Ernest Weingartner, ernest.weingartner@fhnw.ch