ARL

The Aerosol Research Lab (ARL), directed by Professor Alan Shihadeh, is home to an interdisciplinary research group with backgrounds in aerosol dynamics, chemistry, combustion, instrumentation, and controls. We produce policy-relevant science with thematic focuses on tobacco control, urban and indoor air pollution, and atmospheric particle dynamics and collaborate widely with research groups at AUB and around the world. Several novel instruments for tobacco control research have been developed at the lab, including waterpipe and electronic cigarette smoking topography devices, an in-situ real-time sampling device for waterpipe smoke analysis, and a smoking robot that can mimic human puffing behavior in millisecond detail. These instruments are used by researchers in Southwest Asia, Europe, and the USA.

Operating in a 200 m2 space of the Irani Oxy Building located on the lower campus of AUB, the lab is equipped with a variety of particle sampling, sizing, and generation instruments, gasoline and diesel engine setups, an oxidation flow reactor to simulate atmospheric photochemistry, and environmentally controlled Teflon® chambers of various sizes. The lab has access to GC-MS, HPLC-MS, and ICP-MS instruments in shared AUB facilities and benefits from close proximity to machine and electronics shops.​

The Aerosol Research Lab was founded in 2002 by Professor Shihadeh, and has since benefitted from research awards from the US National Institutes of Health, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Research for International Tobacco Control (IDRC), and the Lebanese Council for Scientific Research, totaling approximately $4 million in support since 2007. In September 2013, the lab became the physical sciences and technology arm of the Virginia Commonwealth University Center for the Study of Tobacco Products, a US FDA Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science. ​​