Delphine K Farmer

Delphine Farmer is a Canadian chemist who is a professor at the Colorado State University. Her research considers the development of scientific instruments for atmospheric science. She was awarded the American Geophysical Union Atmospheric Sciences Ascent Award in 2022.

Early life and education Farmer grew up on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Her father, David M. Farmer, was an oceanographer, and she spent her childhood playing in his laboratory. She has credited her love of physics to a high school teacher, and her love of chemistry to an undergraduate lecturer. Farmer studies outdoor and indoor atmospheric chemistry. She looks to understand the sources and sinks of trace gases in the atmosphere.

Farmer studies the impact of wildfires on air quality, and has flown through wildfire smoke plumes to monitor scientific instruments. She also used ground-based data from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Southern Great Plains observatory. The spectrometer uses a laser to determine the size of aerosol particles. and were less likely to react with surfaces or materials in air to form toxic chemicals.

Farmer and Marina E. Vance were leaders of the HOMEChem project (House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry), which studied the indoor environment using a test house at the University of Texas at Austin. Because no one lived in the house, researchers could do controlled studies to observe the effects of specific activities, such as cooking, cleaning, and ventilation. Depending on the order activities that occurred in the house, chemicals from different events reacted to form new chemical products. Researchers used a wide variety of measuring instruments to observe organic compounds and oxidants (e.g. hydroxyl radicals, ozone, and nitrogen oxides).

After the Marshall Fire in Boulder County, Colorado in December 2021, Farmer and others developed the Chemical Assessment of Surfaces and Air study (CASA, 2022) to examine the effects of smoke in homes. They used the Residential Test Facility (RTF) at the National Institute of Standards (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD as a test house. Researchers found that volatile organic compounds from smoke stick to indoor surfaces such as floors, walls, and ceilings. There they build up "reservoirs" which continue to be released back into household air over hours, days or even months. They continue to interact with other chemicals in the surfaces and the inside air. Air purifiers could remove some VOCs temporarily from the air, but did not remove smoke VOCs that had attached to surfaces. To remove surface VOCs, scientists vacuumed, dusted and wiped down surfaces using a commercially available bleach-free cleaning solution.

Farmer has also studied the blooming of the Titan arum, or corpse flower, known for its rare flowering and intense stink.

Selected publications