Journal Club: how energy use and pollutant emissions scale with urban population
Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an exciting peer-reviewed journal article and interview one of its lead authors. We talk about their paper, their work, and their STEM identities.
My guest today is Liam Thompson, who is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah in the Department of Atmospheric Science. We’re talking about his 2026 paper “Contrasting patterns in urban energy and emission scaling” in Environmental Research Letters. I find this meta-analysis so interesting! It’s digging into how energy use and associated pollutants scale with increasing population in urban corridors, with some unintuitive results that we chat about.
What really caught my eye was that Liam did this work while he was an undergraduate student at the University of Oklahoma. As someone who only barely dabbled in research in undergrad, I am always impressed by anyone who pulls off an impressive research project, let alone publishes on it!
We also talk about work-life balance and finding undergraduate research opportunities!
Find all episodes for Journal Club here!
Song of the week: not a song but a legend: the late, great, incomparable Dolly Parton.
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