A respected faculty and researcher from Uzbekistan has joined the CEE faculty as a part of the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship program.
Dr. Mansur Amonov said that the opportunity to work with CEE's Dr. Armistead Russell made the 10-month move to the United States very attractive. He is collaborating with Russell to correct a huge data set from the EPA CSN sites.
An environmental engineering professor at Uzbekistan's Tashkent State Agrarian University, Amonov said that he is better able to pursue his research interests in the United States.
"I was doing research on particulate air pollution [at Tashkent] but there was not enough equipment available for me to analyize organic carbon and elemental carbon," he said. "I know how to play with my data, but I couldn't effectively analyze the data I collected from home with the tools I had there."
At Georgia Tech, he has been able to solve that problem, which will ultimately allow him to publish results that look at the sources of air pollution in Tashkent.
"This study may help to focus the limited economic resources of the region on maximizing public health benefits by control of the most damaging emissions. The research also provides supporting data to epidemiologists and other scientists who work in related to environmental science topics."
In addition to his collaborations with Russell and his colleague Dr. Mike Bergin, Amonov has worked closely with several graduate students at Georgia Tech. Contrasting this with his teaching experience in Uzbekistan, he smiles.
"In Uzbekistan, we [faculty] talk more, we give students information and explain many things. But in the United States, the students have homework, projects, tests, and learn a lot by doing," he said. "They talk with their professors and ask lots of questions. I think this is better than sitting and listening all the time."
Dr. Amonov will conclude his Fulbright Fellowship in the end of July, but he looks forward to collaborating with Russell and Bergin in the future.
"I want to continue, because there are many things that we are doing in common," he said. "For instance Dr. Bergin is looking at the effects of elemental carbon on glaciers in Greenland and I am looking at the effect of air pollution on the glaciers in the mountains of Uzbekistan."