The award was presented to Yuan by Mr. William Spratlin, president of A&WMA, at the Student Reception and Award Ceremony on June 24, 2003, at the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel, San Diego, Calif. A total of 62 students from around the world participated in the competition.
"It is a great honor for me to win this award," said Yuan, "not only because the competition attracted international students to participate but also because all the subjects related to air and waste issues were involved in the competition. The first prize I won represents the highest acknowledgement from the world's largest environmental association. I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Akula Venkatram, for his valuable guidance and support on my research."
For the competition, Yuan submitted a technical paper for the judges' reviews. "Three judges were assigned to review all the paper independently," he said. "I condensed all the information I wanted to present into a poster and gave presentations of my research to each of the judges. The final score of each paper/poster was based on 25% of paper writing, 40% of poster arrangement, and 35% of oral presentation and question answering."
The poster is based on Yuan's research paper: Development and Evaluation of a Dispersion Model for Source-Receptor Distances Less Than 100 Meters in Urban Environment. He and Venkatram are coauthors of the paper. "All the judges recommended that I send the paper to journals, such as Atmospheric Environment, for publication," Yuan said. "Also, part of this research paper will be published on another conference proceeding: Guideline on Air Quality Models: The Path Forward."
Yuan's research focuses on urban air pollution dispersion modeling. "There is a critical need for dispersion tools that provide reliable modeling results to support the assessment of potential health impacts from exposures to air toxics from urban sources such as gasoline stations, where human receptors are typically within fifty meters from the source," he explained. "My research responds to this need by way of developing a new dispersion model that can be used to estimate the impact of such urban sources."
Yuan received his M.S. in environmental engineering from Tsinghua University, China, in 2001 and his B.S. in atmospheric physics and environment from Nanjing Institute of Meteorology, China, in 1995. In the past he won a 2002-2003 Excellent Student Research Paper Scholarship from the Air & Waste Management Association-West Coast Section.
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