Dr. Tamara Sparks joined PSE Healthy Energy in 2024 as an Air Quality Scientist. She has a diverse experience in air quality and natural gas research that she uses to study the health and climate impacts of natural gas usage.
Dr. Sparks got her PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, with a research focus on air quality and atmospheric chemistry. On multiple aircraft-based field studies, she measured nitrogen oxide species to understand their impact on urban ozone pollution. After graduating, she spent two years at the California Department of Public Health doing air quality studies on wildfire emissions and COVID transmission using aerosol modeling. She then spent three years at the Colorado School of Mines Payne Institute for Public Policy doing satellite remote sensing of gas flaring. Her research group at Mines produced near real-time, global data of gas flaring and a database of over 10,000 global flaring sites.
