Spanning the Globe Through Research and Education

Prasad Kasibhatla, a scientist who for more than two decades has probed how humans are changing our atmosphere’s chemical composition around the world, has added another global assignment by becoming the Nicholas School’s first associate dean of international programs.

With his new duties, the India-born associate professor of atmospheric chemistry began boosting his frequent flier miles in February 2008 when he and Nicholas School Dean William L. Chameides—Kasibhatla’s longtime research associate—went to Delhi, India, to attend a sustainable development conference.

A trip followed to Abu Dhabi, where the Nicholas School was invited to participate in a joint masters program. And last October, he joined Duke President Richard H. Brodhead on another visit to Mumbai, India. Calling Kasibhatla a “proud hometown boy,” Brodhead wrote in a blog how Kasibhatla “took us on a long ramble through modern shops and ancient reading rooms, past sandal makers and sugar cane grinders...”

With 2009’s arrival, “I’m hoping to focus on developing some joint programs and to figure out strategically where we might want to invest some of our resources,” Kasibhatla says.

While the Nicholas School is no stranger to international education and research ventures, the new associate dean is nurturing ideas he hopes will challenge students in new ways. “Our students already have taken on problems that cross all kinds of boundaries,” he says, noting a recent international water management project in Sri Lanka, and projects on energy resources in India and on sea turtles in the Caribbean.

Last September, Chameides signed a memorandum of understanding between the Nicholas School and the Higher Colleges of Technology of the United Arab Emirates and the Energy and Resources Institute of New Delhi, India, to explore the creation of an international master of environmental management degree program. That program, if approved by the Duke Board of Trustees, would concentrate on environmental issues facing the Middle East, Indian subcontinent and North Africa.

When Chameides announced the appointment last April, he noted that Kasibhatla will help “create expanded opportunities abroad for Nicholas School students as part of a campuswide initiative to increase Duke’s international presence.”

Initial efforts will center in part on launching an international version of the Duke Environmental Leadership program that offers an online master of environmental management degree and continuing educational opportunities for working professionals.

India could be a prime location to launch that effort, the dean indicated.

Kasibhatla says they chose India because “It is a huge country with a growing population and growing affluence, a democracy like the United States. But at the same time, it presents a natural place to go to look for contrasts.

“It has a challenging environment. While it has a very big middle class, there is a huge segment of the population that is underprivileged.”

Kasibhatla decided to take on the additional job of associate dean “because of my interest in the global scale and interconnectedness of environmental issues,” he says. “In my research, I grapple with issues related to how rapid changes are affecting air quality in developing countries. Plus, I see an increased interest in environmental questions from countries like India, reflected in the increased number of inquiries we are getting from international students to study here.

“The chance to work in places like India, which are dear to me, is wonderful.”

Kasibhatla’s own road to becoming an academic atmospheric scientist started out in his native India with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at the University of Bombay. He then searched for graduate programs that were not traditional, he says. “The two areas that caught my attention were water and air quality, because in some sense they both involve giant reactors that are natural systems,” he says.

He began investigating schools in the United States—familiar territory for his parents. His father did postdoctoral research at Argonne National Laboratory before joining India’s atomic energy agency. His mother received a master’s degree in geography from the University of Kansas before earning her PhD in India.

Kasibhatla settled on getting a master’s and PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Kentucky because the school’s curriculum matched his growing interest in modeling, numbers and statistics.

After graduating from Kentucky in 1988, Kasibhatla began an eight-year tie with the Georgia Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow working under Chameides, who was then on the faculty there. Most of that time he spent as a visiting scientist at Princeton University’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), where he worked until 1993.

Kasibhatla says the GFDL was among a handful of research centers where the first global-scale models designed to assess atmospheric chemistry were developed.

While those started out relatively simple, they underwent explosive growth during the 1990s because of vast improvements in chemical sensing technology.

Work he began in the 1990s with Princeton colleagues provided one of the first global assessments of how precursors of ozone (O3) get created and distributed in Earth’s lower atmosphere. In the upper atmosphere, this extra-reactive type of oxygen molecule helps shield Earth from solar ultraviolet radiation. But lower down, much of the O3 is generated as a byproduct of human activities that can harm both agricultural crops and human health.

By using atmospheric models developed at GFDL, researchers could assign individual “tags” to the various precursors of ozone and then follow them as they mixed and interacted in their model version of the lower atmosphere. In a global simulation published in April, 1994, in Science, Kasibhatla and colleagues at GFDL and Georgia Tech estimated that between 10 percent and 35 percent of global grain production occurred in places where pollution from lower atmosphere ozone may reduce crop yields.

During 1994 he relocated to the Baltimore area with his wife, Susan Dunlap, whom he had met at Princeton. When she became an associate Presbyterian minister at a Maryland church, he became a visiting scientist working at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center.

The special meteorological expertise available at NASA/Goddard let Kasibhatla and his team simulate year-to-year variability in a study they published on the atmospheric chemistry of another gas, carbon monoxide, or CO. Produced by incomplete combustion from sources such as smoldering fires, CO reduces atmospheric concentrations of reactive chemicals.

Those chemicals can increase global warming by altering the concentrations of atmospheric methane, yet another greenhouse gas, released by farm animals, rice paddies, bogs and natural gas wells.

In 1995, Kasibhatla moved to North Carolina after Susan joined the faculty at Duke Divinity School. He initially joined MCNC, a state-founded microelectronics research facility in Research Triangle Park that then included the North Carolina Supercomputing Center. While working there he decided that the state of modeling had become advanced enough to try running regional simulations of the evolution and transport of ozone over extended amounts of time.

After Kasibhatla joined the Duke faculty as an assistant research professor in 1997, a number of new research papers quickly followed. One found that a majority of the sulfur dioxide detected in the atmosphere above the north Atlantic and northern Pacific oceans is emitted by ships. Others simulated the distribution of ozone pollution in the eastern United States over an entire late spring and summer period, and assessed the global impact of human activity on lower atmosphere ozone.

A January 2004 study Kasibhatla coauthored with seven colleagues in Science demonstrated that global emissions from drought-induced fires may account for previously unexplained year-to-year variability in atmospheric greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

Since carbon dioxide warms the atmosphere much like air is warmed in a solar greenhouse, that conclusion carried a take-home message: CO2 emissions from fires are an important part of the global warming story.

To do that assessment, a NASA-funded computer modeling program Kasibhatla helped develop—called GEOS-CHEM—had to simulate the evolution of a huge chemistry experiment fed by combustion products. In the process, it accounted for movements of various gases from region to region by factoring in long-distance wind patterns and localized thunderstorms. 

Performing these calculations required reliable information on substances that exist in the atmosphere in only scant traces. “So the measurement challenges were immense,” Kasibhatla says.

His most recent coauthored articles have used a variety of tools to advance our understanding of fire emissions associated with tropical deforestation in the Amazon and in Borneo.

During the past three years, he has also been teaching a freshman seminar course called “What on Earth” in which he and other invited experts look at how society is dealing with environmental issues in fields ranging from conservation biology to fisheries management to climate change.

“I want the students to get a deeper sense of both the science and the policy,” he says. “I also want to make them aware of the various opportunities at Duke. The students have been absolutely wonderful, very enthusiastic, intellectually curious and passionate. It’s been great.

“So you might say that through all my teaching and research, I focus on the interconnectedness of environmental issues and how various countries are dealing with them.”