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A headshot of Scot Miller wearing a black and white checkered shirt and standing outdoors of the campus.

Scot Miller, assistant professor of environmental health and engineering, has been named a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Early CAREER Award, which recognizes early-stage scholars with high levels of promise and excellence. 

Scot studies the emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants. His lab, the Greenhouse Gas Research Group, uses observations of greenhouse gases collected from airplanes, towers, and satellites to estimate emissions across individual states to continents. Scot’s award project, “Methane emissions from the US and Canada—novel insights from an expanding observation network,” seeks to quantify how methane emissions in the United States, Canada, and Mexico have changed over nearly two decades. Using an expanding network of atmospheric methane observations (collected from airplanes, atop TV towers, and satellites) and recent advances in inverse modeling (algorithms and software), it is now possible to estimate previously unaccounted sources of CH4 emissions in North America. This data can be used to better understand and quantify CH4 emissions in North America and guide the implementation and evaluation of policies and solutions designed to reduce methane emissions whose global warming potential is 28 times more than that of carbon dioxide over a 100-year period.