Assistant Professor Da Pan has received the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation.
The NSF CAREER Award supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
The award provides $986,119 over five years to support Pan’s research project, Understanding Land-Atmosphere Exchange of Reactive Nitrogen through Tiered and Machine Learning Assisted Monitoring.
Pan said it is an incredible honor and a strong encouragement to receive the award at this stage of his career.
“I am grateful for NSF’s support because this award gives me the opportunity to build a long-term research and education program around a problem I care deeply about: improving our understanding of the nitrogen cycle so that society can better manage nitrogen for food security, air quality, ecosystem health, and climate-relevant impacts,” Pan said.
Nitrogen is essential for plant growth and food production, but excess nitrogen from agriculture and combustion can enter the air as compounds such as ammonia and nitrogen oxides. These compounds contribute to air pollution, fine particulate matter, ozone formation, and ecosystem impacts when they return to the land through deposition.
“A major challenge is that scientists do not currently have enough direct flux measurements to understand where these nitrogen compounds are emitted, how they travel, and where they are deposited,” Pan said.
To bridge this gap, Pan’s project will develop a tiered monitoring framework that combines direct measurements at highly instrumented “supersites,” lower-cost measurements at additional locations, existing air quality observations, satellite data, atmospheric models, and machine learning. The goal is to create a more complete and cost-effective way to monitor nitrogen exchange across larger regions.
In the long term, Pan hopes this research will help provide the scientific foundation for better nitrogen management. The monitoring framework and datasets developed through this project could help evaluate agricultural practices, improve air quality and deposition models, support satellite-based estimates of nitrogen emissions, and inform environmental policy.
“Ultimately, the work aims to contribute to strategies that maintain agricultural and industrial productivity while reducing harmful nitrogen losses to the atmosphere and ecosystems,” Pan said.
Beyond research, the CAREER Award also supports an educational and outreach component. A key goal of the project involves launching A-NICE (Atmospheric Nitrogen Cycle Education), which will engage students, teachers, agricultural stakeholders, and community participants in learning about nitrogen’s environmental impacts. The program will include educational modules, student participation in monitoring activities, and community-oriented sampling efforts such as precipitation and air sample collection.
Pan also sees this as an important opportunity to train students in an interdisciplinary area that connects environmental engineering, atmospheric science, agriculture, data science, and public policy.
Additionally, Pan and the research team will collaborate with the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP) to share findings with researchers and stakeholders, connecting the project’s monitoring and outreach activities with broader national efforts to understand atmospheric nitrogen deposition.