Bio
Jordan Wilkerson graduated with a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Chemistry at the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in May 2021. I am now a Postdoctoral Writing Fellow at Harvard's Fellowships & Writing Center, where I work with graduate students on their writing and presentations, so they can more effectively tell the world about their work.
My years of research have all been aimed at a central goal: understanding our planet's atmosphere and how we have changed it. As a Ph.D. candidate, I studied two distinct issues in atmospheric science. First, I studied an important aspect of the fragile cryosphere—greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost. This resulted in two publications in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and an invited talk at the 2019 European Geosciences Union conference. I also worked on a team to build an instrument platform to directly observe the ozone layer, then led a 2018 NASA mission that tested the platform on a balloon-borne campaign through the stratosphere. The instruments focused on measuring ozone and hydrogen chloride (HCl), whose abrupt decrease in concentration may signal the formation of more reactive chlorine compounds that can damage the ozone layer. The results of this campaign were published in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques.
As an undergraduate, I conducted research at Texas A&M University and University of Central Arkansas. At the former, I studied the mechanistic breakdown of formaldehyde, an important air pollutant that can significantly reduce air quality; at the latter, I studied organic chemistry.
I am actively committed to communicating and expanding access to scientific findings with the broader public. I have given many public talks about environmental topics such as urban air pollution and the impact of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking and have written dozens of popular science articles for various news outlets (see Publications page for links to these).