Summary
Role and Research Interests
Seb Eastham is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Aviation in the Department of Aeronautics, and a member of the Brahmal Vasudevan Institute for Sustainable Aviation. His research is dedicated to understanding how the aerospace sector affects the environment, and identifying new ways to mitigate those impacts so that we can continue to enjoy the benefits of the sector without the environmental costs. This work can range from trying to understand how aircraft condensation trails (contrails) interact with natural cloud, to looking at the potential benefits of cleaner rocket fuels. Other areas of interest include local and regional air quality effects of aviation, aerospace-induced changes in the ozone layer, CO2 and non-CO2 climate impacts resulting from aerospace emissions, and investigating new ways to deploy aerospace assets so that we can more closely and accurately observe the environmental effects of the aerospace sector.
Seb's work is mostly computational, relying on the development and application of computational models of Earth's atmosphere such as the GEOS-Chem global atmospheric chemistry transport model and the APCEMM aircraft plume physics model. However this is complemented by the use of observations from both Earth observation platforms (e.g. geostationary satellites) and aircraft measurement campaigns, and by the development and application of machine learning techniques to interpret those observations.
Background
- 2024 onwards: Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Aviation, Brahmal Vasudevan Institute for Sustainable Aviation, Imperial College London
- 2022-2024: Principal Research Scientist, Center for Global Change Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- 2017-2022: Research Scientist, Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- 2015-2017: Joint NOAA Climate and Global Change and Harvard University Center for the Environment Postdoctoral Fellow, Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group, Harvard University
- 2011-2015: PhD in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering with a thesis on "Human Health Impacts of High Altitude Emissions", Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- 2007-2011: M.A./M.Eng. in Aerospace and Aerothermal Engineering, University of Cambridge
Publications
Journals
Eastham SD, Chossière GP, Speth RL, et al., 2024, Global impacts of aviation on air quality evaluated at high resolution, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Vol:24, ISSN:1680-7316, Pages:2687-2703
Geraedts S, Brand E, Dean TR, et al., 2024, A scalable system to measure contrail formation on a per-flight basis, Environmental Research Communications, Vol:6
Moch JM, Mickley LJ, Eastham SD, et al., 2023, Overlooked Long-Term Atmospheric Chemical Feedbacks Alter the Impact of Solar Geoengineering: Implications for Tropospheric Oxidative Capacity, Agu Advances, Vol:4
Picciano P, Qiu M, Eastham SD, et al., 2023, Air quality related equity implications of U.S. decarbonization policy., Nat Commun, Vol:14
Sun H, Bourguet S, Eastham S, et al., 2023, Optimizing Injection Locations Relaxes Altitude-Lifetime Trade-Off for Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol:50, ISSN:0094-8276