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Current Group Members

Current Group Members

Jon Abbatt (PI)

Contact: jonathan.abbatt@utoronto.ca

Jon obtained his BSc from UofT Chemistry in 1984 and spent 16 years in the US (Harvard PhD, MIT Post Doc, U of Chicago Assistant/Associate Professor) before returning to UofT. His research interests are in atmospheric and environmental chemistry, with a focus on particulate, cloud, and indoor chemistry. Specific research topics include: rates and mechanisms of multiphase chemistry in outdoor and indoor environments; the role of particles in promoting the formation of both liquid water and ice clouds; field measurements of VOCs and aerosol composition especially in remote regions such as the Arctic; aerosol chemistry related to wildfires.

Jon has been on the editorial boards of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Atmospheric Measurement Techniques, Scientific Reports, and Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres. He is currently an associate editor for Science Advances. He was a member of the NASA/JPL Data Evaluation Panel for Atmosphere Modeling and co-chair of the 2011 Gordon Conference on Atmospheric Chemistry. He has served on scientific steering committees for the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry project, Max Planck Institute Mainz, and Center for Aerosols and Climate. He has been given the CIC Environmental Research Award and CIC Medal, was made a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, was elected to the Royal Society of Canada, and won a Killam Research Fellowship. He was the PI of NETCARE (Network on Climate and Aerosols) which won the NSERC Brockhouse Award for interdisciplinary research. Jon is currently the PI of the BBCan (Biomass Burning in Canada) project funded by ECCC (bbcan.net).



Zhancong (Zac) Liang

Contact: zhancong.liang@utoronto.ca

Zac received his Ph.D. from the City University of Hong Kong in 2023 under the supervision of Prof. Chak K. Chan. He subsequently continued in the same research group as a postdoctoral fellow and later as a research scientist after the group relocated to King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. His previous research focused on the multiphase photochemistry of atmospheric aerosol particles, in particular, biomass-burning organic aerosol (BBOA). In January 2026, Zac joined the Abbatt group as a postdoctoral fellow, where he investigates the kinetics of BBOA dark chemistry, with a central focus on its temperature dependence.



Heather Wallace

Contact: heath.wallace@utoronto.ca

Heather received her H.B.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University of Waterloo in June 2025. As an undergraduate co-op student at Health Canada, she quantified the migration of cyclic siloxanes from silicone bakeware into a food simulant using GC-QTOF-MS. She began her M.Sc. in the Abbatt group in May 2026, where her research currently investigates the heterogeneous ozonolysis of active pesticide compounds used in indoor environments.



Mohamad Al-Jabiri

Contact: moe.aljabiri@utoronto.ca

Mohamad obtained his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Wolfgang Jäger at the University of Alberta in 2024. His research focused on using chirped-pulse Fourier transform microwave spectroscopy to investigate the early stages of nucleation between semi-volatile organic compounds and water molecules, as well other atmospherically relevant species. In June 2024, he joined the Abbatt group as a postdoctoral fellow, where he is conducting laboratory experiments and participating in field campaigns to study the aging of brown carbon aerosols.



Jillian Downey

Contact: j.downey@mail.utoronto.ca

Jillian received her B.Sc. in Chemistry at Mount Allison University in May 2022. In her undergraduate degree, she studied the relationship between antioxidant decay and oxidant production from the inhalation of common quinones found in aerosol, under the supervision of previous Abbatt group member, Dr. Jenny Wong. Jillian joined the Abbatt group in September 2022. Currently, her research focuses on the heterogenous ozone chemistry on indoor surfaces.



William Fahy

Contact: william.fahy@mail.utoronto.ca

Will received a joint B.Sc./M.Sc. in chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University in 2021 under Professor Ryan Sullivan where he studied how atmospheric transformations of volcanic ash can influence its ice nucleation activity. He joined the Abbatt and Mabury groups at U of T for his PhD in September 2021 to study aqueous and heterogeneous transformations of environmental contaminants.



Yao Yan Huang

Contact: yaoyan.huang@mail.utoronto.ca

Yao Yan received her H.B.Sc. in Environmental Chemistry from the University of Toronto Scarborough in June 2023. During her undergraduate studies, she did some work with the Donaldson group looking at ozone gradients in lakeshore environments and urban grime using ion chromatography. She joined the Abbatt group for her PhD in September 2023 to study the heterogenous chemistry of plastic additives.




Carolina Ramirez Romero

Contact: carolina.ramirezromero@utoronto.ca

Carolina obtained her Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from IMT Nord Europe in France, in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany. Her doctoral research focused on the gas-particle partitioning of semi-volatile species from biogenic precursors under near-pristine conditions in the Amazon rain forest. Carolina joined the Abbatt group in January 2025. Her current research focuses on the ice-nucleating properties of mineral dust and its potential use in cirrus seeding by promoting cloud thinning, a solar management technique to mitigate climate warming.