Steve completed his PhD in 2004 and is now a consulting engineer at a defense contractor in New Jersey. His research focused on the characterization of atmospheric organic particulate matter using new aerosol-specific calibrations for FTIR spectroscopy technique. FTIR analysis can quantify organic alkane, alkene, aromatic, alcohol, carbonyl, sulfur, and nitrogen groups, allowing for estimates of total organic carbon (OC) and total organic mass (OM) bulk submicron aerosol concentrations. The resulting OM/OC ratios provide an improved estimate of the conversion factor used to convert from the widely-used thermal-optical OC measurements to total OM.