Pike Thackray takes the Prize

Based on the near unanimous decision of his peers, Colin wins $50 (and a whole lot more kudos!) for his project applying polynomial chaos theory to a problem in atmospheric chemistry.

As Colin describes it, his project was 'an application of the Probabilistic Collocation Method (PCM) to GEOS-Chem simulations of benzo[a]pyrene (BaP), essentially a reduction of GEOS-Chem's (potentially complicated) response to uncertain parameters (the parameters that are important to the atmospheric chemistry of BaP) into a computationally cheap polynomial.'

Reducing the cost of a model in this way is called Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE) and results in a polynomial that can be easily Monte Carlo sampled on the order of hundreds of thousands of times to get a probabilistic representation of the uncertainty due to uncertainty in model parameters. In other words, using Colin's PCM application with GEOS-Chem was like 'running the model ~100 times but obtaining uncertainty information as if it had been run ~100 000 times' - a radical cost saving.

Advised by Noelle Selin, Colin is a grad student who originally joined the Selin Group as a research assistant in late 2011. In that position he supported modeling work in both the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and Engineering Systems Division on the economic and health impacts of potential air quality scenarios. Prior to joining the Selin Group, Colin obtained a Master's degree at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a numerical reconstruction of historical surface energy fluxes in the Canadian High Arctic. During his time with Dalhousie, Colin also worked with the CANDAC RMR LiDAR at Eureka, Nunavut.