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Video feature: In the field, graduate students lead air-quality sensor research .

A team of five Princeton graduate students is leading a year-long field research project using new laser sensors to measure pollutants with unprecedented sensitivity.

Probing air pollution with laser sensors .

Mark Zondlo, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton University and its Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, develops tools to measure air pollution in more sophisticated and nimble ways than previously possible.

New engineering center to transform sensor technology .

The National Science Foundation has funded a multimillion-dollar engineering research center based at Princeton University that is expected to revolutionize sensor technology, yielding devices that have a unique ability to detect minute amounts of chemicals found in the atmosphere, emitted from factories or exhaled in human breath. 

Video feature: ‘Earth’s Last Frontier: The Atmosphere’ .

Princeton engineering professor Mark Zondlo and his team of researchers are mapping Earth’s atmosphere from pole to pole in search of the most comprehensive picture yet of greenhouse gases and how they affect climate. The team is traveling in a superfast research aircraft that includes a new laser-based sensor invented by Zondlo’s team to measure water vapor throughout the atmosphere.

Portable and precise gas sensor could monitor pollution and detect disease .

A team of Princeton and Rice University researchers has demonstrated a new method of identifying the nitric oxide using lasers and sensors that are inexpensive, compact and highly sensitive. Such a portable device, suitable for large-scale deployment, could be of great value to atmospheric science, pollution control, biology and medicine.

Olympic air-quality study tests lasers and scientists’ political savvy .

Most people traveled to the 2008 Beijing Olympics for the sporting events and pageantry. Anna Michel went for the smog. Michel traveled to China as part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Princeton and Rice universities to study changes in Beijing’s air quality during the Olympics, when the Chinese government dramatically cut vehicle and factory emissions.

Video feature: ‘Plastic Electronics’ .

New developments in plastic electronics potentially could change the quality of human life in a wide range of ways, according to Princeton engineering professor Yueh-Lin (Lynn) Loo.