Pawel Misztal
Fariborz Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Building Energy & Environments (BEE)
Pawel Misztal is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering. He joined the UT faculty in the Fall 2019 after completing his work as a PostDoc and Research Specialist at the University of California at Berkeley. His areas of expertise are Building Energy & Environments and Environmental and Water Resources Engineering. His lab, which is located at the Center for Energy and Environmental Resources (CEER), is well equipped in analytical chemistry instrumentation and contains state-of-the-art instruments to measure air composition.
The Vocus, in particular, is the proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer, simply called “the sniffer.” The sniffer is an instrument that’s revolutionary because it can detect more than 1,000 compounds in real time. It can see the full chemistry of the air with an extremely low detection limit. The sniffer has been utilized on different projects in the lab at CEER and on the mobile lab for comprehensive air quality measurements. The mobile lab is a fully equipped electric Ford e-Transit vehicle. With the sniffer on the road, the team can map out pollution composition and record air quality information data near the community sources.
Misztal, along with several colleagues, is involved in a $17 million deal project in Southeast Texas, called the Southeast Texas Urban Integrated Field Lab (SETx-IFL). This project focuses on communities trapped between flooding and air pollution. With their research, they would like to advance the work of improving air quality, especially in dealing with environmental justice. They do a lot of community outreach in Austin and Southeast TX, where they inform communities of their research outcomes. Their primary goal is to improve equality and the well-being of a society.
Misztal’s group is discovery oriented; in fact, they discover new molecules almost every day. Interested in big research questions, they work on how to best address them. The team is developing methods to characterize chemical compositions and actively works to push the frontiers.
