Jason West

Professor, Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
J. Jason West is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he performs interdisciplinary research addressing air pollution and climate change, by using models of atmospheric chemistry and transport, and tools for quantitative policy analysis. Dr. West has worked as a Research Scientist at Princeton University, and prior to that, at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC under a fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has also been a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and a visiting scientist at the National Institute of Ecology in Mexico City. He has a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, earned jointly between Civil & Environmental Engineering and Engineering & Public Policy, an M.Phil. in Environment & Development from the University of Cambridge, an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon, and a B.S. in Civil & Environmental Engineering from Duke University.

Dr. West is interested broadly in the relationships between air pollution and climate change, and their relevance for environmental science and policy. Using computer models, Dr. West is currently exploring the effects of changes in emissions on global air quality (focusing on ozone and particulate matter), the international transport of air pollutants, the health effects of air pollution, the effects of climate change on air quality, and the radiative forcing of climate. He has been involved in air quality modeling studies on the global, regional (Middle East), national (US), and local (Mexico City) scales. Recently, Dr. West led the first study of the co-benefits of greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation for air quality and human health to use global atmospheric models and future scenarios; results showed that the monetized co-benefits exceeded previous co-benefits estimates and exceeded the global costs of GHG mitigation in 2030 and 2050.