Latest News

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

September 12, 2025

It's official! Our fourth TARTA instrument is now live in San Bruno, which is super exciting for our research team. This new site is a big deal because it expands our network and gives us a much more detailed picture of the air quality across the city.

We presented our research poster at the Air Quality and Health Conference, sponsored by the Health Sciences Research Institute and the Department of Public Health at the University of California Merced on October 17, 2024. This meeting brought together the many people working on air quality across the San Joaquin Valley and California to share current research, discuss new research directions, and discuss what policies, actions, and education are needed to improve air quality and public hea

An important part of the community-engaged work is the direct collaboration we have with a wide range of community members. Through our partnership with United Latinos in South Sacramento, we were invited to participate in workshops with middle and high school students as part of their curriculum.

https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/statewide-research-uses-advanced-instruments-analyze-hazardous-air-pollutants 

Communities of color are disproportionately zoned and selected as sites for fossil fuel infrastructure projects given how dangerous and unhealthy constant exposure is (Pellow, 2020). This is particularly evident in the cluster of refineries along the Bay Area coast, which are located near frontline communities and have been active as early as 1896–such as the Phillips 66 San Francisco Refinery–and can process up to 120,200 barrels of crude oil per day (California Energy Commission, 2023).