Julia Schmale
Julia Yvonne Schmale is a German environmental scientist. She is a specialist in the micro-physical makeup of the atmosphere, in particular aerosols and their interaction with clouds. She is a professor at EPFL and the head of the Extreme Environments Research Laboratory. She is a participant in the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate expeditions.
Career
Schmale studied environmental engineering at the University of Leoben, and received her master's degree in 2007 with a thesis on contaminated site remediation. She then joined Stephan Borrmann and Johannes Schneider at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the University of Mainz as a PhD student to work on in situ and online aerosol mass spectrometry with a focus on remote regions such as the Arctic, Subantarctic, and upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. She graduated in 2011 at the Paul Scherrer Institute where she continued her investigation into aerosol processes in extreme environments.Since 2019, she has been a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at the Institute of Environmental Engineering at EPFL, and the head of the Extreme Environments Research Laboratory at EPFL's School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Valais-Wallis Campus.
Research
Schmale's research focuses on environmental processes that impact the chemical and micro-physical makeup of the atmosphere, in particular aerosols that can interact with clouds and thereby may influence Earth's energy balance. Her research aims at distinguishing natural processes from anthropologically influenced processes such as air pollution. She is interested in extreme environments and conducts her research mainly in polar, and high altitude regions. She investigates how oceans, land masses, cryospheres and biospheres interact with the atmosphere, and which influence this interaction might have on radiative forcing. To achieve her measurements, she uses a variety of platforms such as ships, aircraft, tethered balloons, and surface observatories.Her current research is on the Southern Ocean, coastal Antarctica and the central Arctic Ocean. She is principal investigator of MOSAiC, where she conducts the "measurement-based understanding of the aerosol budget in the arctic and its climate effects" project to elucidate the aerosol-cloud interactions for 13 months over the Arctic sea ice.
Schmale is one of the lead authors of the 2015 Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme assessment on "black carbon and ozone as Arctic climate forcers."