CURRENT RESEARCH

The following are the current research activities:

INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH 

Together with Dr Mohamed Abdallah and Professor Roy M. Harrison from the University of Birmingham, Dr. Aquilina is doing analytical work on new flame retardants in deposited house dust from Malta.

Together with Professor Neal L. Benowitz and Dr Peyton Jacob III from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), Dr Aquilina is working on atmospheric pollution due to tobacco smoking. 

LOCAL RESEARCH 

Dr. Aquilina is responsible of setting up the Regional Climate Modelling activities.  The latest version of the regional climate model of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) [http://esp.ictp.it/research/esp-models/regcm3] RegCM4 is used within the Department of Geosciences.  The research group has developed an add-on module to model the formation of secondary organic aerosols (SOAs) and their direct radiative effects on the climate. When the optimisation of the module is done, this module will be available in the new version of the model

The capacity for weather prediction and meteorology related research has been extended to have the Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) model [http://www.wrf-model.org/index.php] on the supercomputer facility, ALBERT at our University. 

PAST RESEARCH

Dr Aquilina has been involved in the following international research activities:

Emissions of VOCs from indoor furnishings with Dr Randy Maddalena at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in 2009.

MATCH Air Toxics Study (as a PhD student) from 2004 to 2008:

http://www.gees.bham.ac.uk/research/MATCH/index.htm

ATREUS Research Training Network (as a research fellow) from 2003 to 2004:

http://smap.ew.eea.europa.eu/fol120392/prj273605/