I'm currently a fourth-year PhD candidate working with Dr. Loretta Mickley and Prof. Daniel Jacob in the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group at Harvard University. The main goals of my current research all evolve around fire: 1) investigate trends in the timing and magnitude of crop residue burning in northwestern India (Punjab and Haryana), as well as the drivers and air quality consequences of these shifts; 2) quantify smoke exposure and public health impacts associated with fire emissions in Indonesia; and 3) assess wildfires and fire-related smoke in North America. I use a combination of remote sensing, GIS, statistics, and atmospheric modeling with both ground-based and satellite-derived datasets. In the past, I worked at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on a variety of topics from physical oceanography to paleoceanography to organic biogeochemistry: 1) identifying autumn-lead global sea surface salinity predictors for prediction of winter precipitation in southwestern United States; 2) reconstructing the strength of the biological pump with carbon isotopes of benthic and planktonic foraminifera in the North Pacific in the last 600,000 years; and 3) reconstructing the late Holocene paleoclimate and paleo-vegetation of Middleton Island, Alaska with with n-alkane distributions and hydrogen isotopes. In my spare time, I enjoy poetry, photography, TV/movie soundtracks, basketball, ceramics, chess puzzles, and crime dramas.
Latest News
Conferences/Events
American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2020
December 7-11, 2020 at Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA
This year, I again co-convened a (virtual) session with Shradda Dhungel and Ritesh Gautam: Aerosols and Air Pollution Extremes in South and Southeast Asia on December 15 (talks, posters). I also presented a talk on "Human-driven temporal shifts in fire activity: southwest Russia and north Australia as case study regions" on December 8 (abstract + recorded talk).
Papers/Writing
Global search for temporal shifts in fire activity: potential human influence on southwest Russia and north Australia fire seasons
February 4, 2021
Our paper is in press at Environmental Research Letters (main + SI)!
Detection and impacts of tiling artifacts in MODIS burned area classification
January 4, 2021
Our paper is published in IOP SciNotes (main + SI)! The Burned Area (BA) Tiling Explorer associated with the paper can be viewed here.
Enhanced aerosol particle growth sustained by high continental chlorine emission in India
November 19, 2020
Sachin Gunthe and Pengfei Liu's paper is published in Nature Geoscience (main + SI)! See articles in Nature Research Chemistry Community, Nature Geoscience News & Views, and Chemistry World for commentary on the paper.