News

I was so excited this last week to have the  opportunity to meet with San Bruno residents at the San Bruno Air Monitoring Workshop. We were able to provide updates to the community on the work we’ve done in the past year, work we are currently doing, and what we are planning to do this upcoming summer. We were especially excited to share about work we’ve done to monitor volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in real time with our HAPSite instrument.

The UC Community Air Project UCSD team is proud to announce that we have added two new
collaborators: Cristian and Eranda. We asked Cristian and Eranda to introduce themselves.

GSR Cristian Fuentes Hernandez

Our research team recently traveled from around California to attend the 2026 Air Sensors International Conference (ASIC), hosted by the UC Davis Air Quality Research Center in Los Angeles. The conference brought together researchers, engineers, policymakers, and community organizations to explore how advances in air quality monitoring can support more effective decision-making.

April 18th, we had the pleasure of being invited to participate in the First Annual San Bruno Rooted in Resilience Fair, “a family-friendly day of community safety, health and preparedness.” I arrived at Belle Air Elementary greeted by friendly volunteers who directed me to the school’s library where, along with our community partners, Rise South City

This month I had the opportunity to attend my first ever American Association of Geographers (AAG) conference in San Francisco where I presented about the research of the Community Air Project. This 5 day foray March 17-21 was an expansive snapshot of what geographers worldwide are focusing on in this critical moment. With an almost overwhelming number of sessions each hour, the topics ranged from Black geographies to geographies of care from a number of angles, to more place-based work, to Indigenous and decolonial studies.

When arriving in San Bruno for our latest round of HAPSite Monitoring, we were greeted by the close ring of a plane landing at San Francisco International Airport nearby. We quickly noticed how our community partner lived in a triangle within two major highways, a train railway, and of course the constant hum of planes coming and going from SFO. 

We are so excited to share that we are in the preliminary stages of incorporating wind data with our TARTA airborne metallic particle results. As you might remember from an earlier blog, we started to deploy a wind sensor alongside our TARTA deployment. 

We were excited for the opportunity to meet with San Bruno residents at a recent workshop hosted by our partners, Rise South City in San Bruno. Our engineering postdoctoral fellow, Dr.

Southeast Los Angeles (SELA) is a region long shaped by industrial land uses and dense transportation infrastructure. Freeways, railyards, warehouses, and manufacturing facilities are embedded directly within residential neighborhoods, contributing to some of the highest cumulative pollution burdens in California. For years, residents have raised concerns about local air quality and its impacts on health.

At the largest military air show in the United States, UC San Diego’s Community Air
Team was there on the ground with TARTA, our air metals sampling instrument, tracking what
the spectacle in the sky mean for the air people breathe. The Miramar Air Show, one of the
largest military air shows in the world, brings hundreds of thousands of visitors to Marine Corps
Air Station Miramar in San Diego each year. Using this year’s event as a natural experiment, our
team ran TARTA for ten days before, during and after the show to see how this concentrated