Claire C. Austin

Biography

Claire C. Austin Adjunct Research Professor Dr. Austin is a research scientist at the Air Quality Research Branch of Environment Canada. With a background in chemistry and industrial toxicology, Degrees: B.Sc. (McGill), M.Ed. (Montreal), Ph.D. (McGill), CIH, CMC  

Research Interest

Dr. Austin is a research scientist at the Air Quality Research Branch of Environment Canada. With a background in chemistry and industrial toxicology, her research focuses on smog science related to air contaminants monitored by the Canadian National Air Pollution Surveillance (NAPS) Network.Target substances include volatile organic compounds (more than 150 polar and nonpolar VOCs, including aromatics, aldehydes, and ketones), semivolatile organic compounds (PAHs, dioxins, and furans), inorganic substances (50 elements, including toxic metals such as arsenic, lead, and mercury as well as inorganic and organic anions and cations), fine particulate matter and particle characterization, and gases (SO2, CO, NOx, and O3). Research activities include the detection, identification and evaluation of known, new and novel ambient air pollutants and their environmental impacts; the development of new measurement and analysis techniques for studying pollutants in ambient air; the quantification of the contribution of transportation sources to ambient particulate matter and VOCs; improved quantification of biogenic and anthropogenic toxic emissions sources; the analysis and human health risk assessment of combustion products generated from fires; the development of a respirator for wildland firefighters, and the quality of compressed breathing air used by municipal firefighters. Dr. Austin is interested in the assessment of current Canadian emission estimates and the identification of the most pressing errors using techniques such as chemical mass balance (CMB) and partial matrix factorization (PMF). In addition, she uses data mining and multivariate statistical analyses techniques such as PCA and PLS to better understand the underlying information contained in the NAPS database and the supporting analytical databases.