Interview with Donald Stedman
Kamila Kinyon

Donald Stedman obtained his undergraduate degree from Cambridge University in 1964 and his doctorate from the University of East Anglia in 1967. From 1968 to 1971, Stedman worked at Ford Motor Company with researchers Hiromi Niki and Bernie Weinstock. Moving to the University of Michigan in 1971, Stedman continued previous investigations with nitric oxide ozone, nickel carbonyl, sulfur monoxide, phosphorus, and arsenic cherniluminescence. He developed new instruments and applied them to the study of atmospheric photochemistry ranging from photochemical smog to stratospheric ozone. In 1983, Stedman accepted a position at the University of Denver where these studies continued and a collaboration began with Gary Bishop, a research engineer in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. This collaboration resulted in the 1989 development of an on-road remote sensor for automobile exhaust carbon monoxide emissions. Subsequent developments have added the ability to measure hydrocarbons and nitric oxide. Stedman currently occupies the Brainerd F. Phillipson Chair of Chemistry at the University of Denver. He has received the Air & Waste Management Association's Frank A. Chambers Award and the American Chemical Society Award for Creative Advances in Environmental Science and Technology.

Kamila Kinyon: How do you use writing in teaching undergraduates? I noticed that you have a wide variety of assignments in your I Care About Air First-Year Seminar class.
Donald Stedman: In my I Care About Air seminar, the students do some writing every week. I get to grade writing every Sunday night. Sometimes its personal writing, like my assignment about a weather experience they had. The two major reports they do involve not only writing but very significant data analysis that they do with spreadsheets because, after all, we are scientists. You get a bunch of data from national parks, and each student has his/her own national park. Ozone levels in national parks vary greatly. The ozone in a national park may be higher or lower in winter or summer. Conceivably, ozone in national parks is different on Mondays and Tuesdays than it is on Saturdays and Sundays, and then students have to write that up as a scientific report.

It seems that this writing assignment about ozone in national parks will give students a good sense of what constitutes research in environmental science. Are they doing original research in these projects?
As far as I know, nobody else is looking at the national park ozone data in the way that were looking at it, so its actually original research that theyre doing, and because there are fifteen of them, were getting fifteen national parks that way. They are learning how to use a spreadsheet. Thats one of the major things theyre learning: how to use their spreadsheet in such a way as to get the type of data that they want to get. Doing a pivot table and an Excel spreadsheet is not something that everyone knows how to do, so it took a great deal of training.

How is the type of writing that you assign to graduate students different from what you assign to undergraduates?
Courses for graduate students are not writing intensive. They involve mathematics and data analysis. I am not looking at writing style on the graduate level until they begin with the thesis, which is a whole different discipline and involves writing with formatting, figures, and tables. These are issues that one works on one on one with graduate students. With undergraduates, I am looking for something that hangs together as a piece of writing.

Could you describe your own writing and research process? With your focus on air quality issues, I imagine that you write for a variety of audiences. What is it like to communicate your research to different types of audiences?
I have written for EM, a general interest magazine for environmental professionals, not necessarily scientists in my discipline. A journal article for Science, like On-Road Vehicle Emissions: Regulations, Costs, and Benefits, clearly must be written in a much more precise style. Science has tight requirements on page length. This particular magazine, which has an 85% rejection rate, uses a lot of footnotes and supplementary materials because there is a very strict page length. The closest Ive gotten to a popular audience was an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that was actually the most influential thing I ever wrote; it got picked up by a Congressman and ended up putting our equipment in the Clean Air Act because of it. It got subsequently taken out by the EPA, but we got put in by Congress because of a little op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. I thought it was fascinating because not only was it for me a different style of writing but a different style of reviewing. I think I submitted it on a Tuesday. By Friday or Saturday, the fact checkers were calling me and my colleagues. The thing was published on Monday, and they paid me, whereas for these scientific journal articles that you write, you spend months writing the article. Then you submit it, and within six months, if youre lucky, you get the reviews back, and if you want to publish, you have to change it extensively. Then you spend the next month changing it, and then you submit it again. Youre lucky if within a year it appears. And you pay the journal; they dont pay you. So The Wall Street Journal was a totally different experience. That was 1990. I dont do much in op-ed because its not my job.

The other major writing task that professors do is writing proposals. All professors in the sciences at DU spend a lot of time writing proposals. The National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health have a 10% acceptance rate, which means you spend huge amounts of time writing proposals. In some aspects, they are more important because you get money. I have to argue, for example, that here is this fantastic piece of research I could do which could be done in a short time and wouldnt cost too much, and I already have preliminary data, and you just have to give me $500,000 over the next five years or whatever it is you intend to ask for.

What are your current research directions?
Improving the on-road remote sensor and using the new tools in on-road remote sensing that we have developed. I just got off the phone a few minutes ago with the National Renewable Energy Lab and the South Coast Air Quality Management District in California. Those are the people in charge of improving the air in Los Angeles, and they want me to come and measure the emissions of the trucks in Los Angeles. They want it to be work that contributes to the historical record, so they want me to measure in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2014 with the same instrumentation with guaranteed calibration measuring the same things. So if the truck fleets change their emissions during that six-year time period, then we will have an independent record that the emissions of those trucks really have changed as predicted. They want us to do an archival historical record of that sort.

Has the remote sensor system been effectively implemented in the Denver metro area?
No. Weve always argued that the right way to use remote sensing is to find the few gross emitters, and then you have to have the political will to do something about them, and that has been very difficult. Were too cheap. Your emission test is $25. If I sit on the exit ramp from north I-25 and West Sixth Avenue, I can measure 10,000 cars, so if I can persuade the drivers to throw me a quarter, I could gross $2,500 a day. I could pay for my van, my driver, an engineer, a little bit of office space . . . thats 100 times less test cost than were using in the state right now, which makes me a huge threat to the people who do emission testing in the state.

The mobile source of pollution is terribly important and is dominated by broken cars. We can find them, but we need to have the political will to deal with them. They are not all owned by poor people. We have some revealing pictures which we took of high hydrocarbon vehicles. For example, one car had a collector plate, used on vehicles twenty-five years or older. This old license plate was on an Infiniti which cannot be that old but probably would fail the emissions test. Another car we photographed was a Honda Civic which looked modified to be a high performance car. It showed black smoke and had no license plate. We could pull these over with a police officer, ticketing the drivers for breaking the law with their plates. Nothing is being done about such cars, but if you arent willing to take action, these cars will be on the road. . . .

Do your students write about on-road remote sensing?
I gave my First-Year Seminar students an article to read that we wrote about on-road remote sensing. You get a very wide range of ability with science, so I gave them the assignment to write what they did or did not understand about this article. Some students will say that they understood the first sentence, that, after that, they didnt understand anything, and that the article was meaningless. Some students will say that they understood everything, but that there was a misprint in the equation on page thirty-two. Those are both equally correct responses from my point of view because what Im interested in is learning the level of knowledge of this heterogeneous group of students that Im teaching. I want them to know what they understand when they read a paper like this. I expect that my chemistry majors will understand more than business majors who are working in a foreign language. On the graduate level, we now have two masters students who are working on on-road remote sensing. Just today, I am commenting on their conference abstracts for a poster they will present in April.

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