Submission overview
Abstracts were invited from researchers working across aerosol science. Submissions were organised into the conference themes outlined in the Program and reviewed for inclusion as speaker presentations.
Accepted speakers were asked to follow up with a full paper for delegates. See the Speakers page for the list of confirmed presenters.
Abstract guidelines
| Item | Guideline |
|---|---|
| Format | Structured abstract aligned to the selected conference theme. |
| Length | Concise summary suitable for review and inclusion in the delegate materials. |
| Authorship | List all contributing authors and a single corresponding presenter. |
| Follow-up | Accepted abstracts progress to full paper submission for delegates. |
Aerosols are among the most studied and least understood components of the atmosphere. Tiny particles suspended in air shape weather, cloud formation, air quality, and the radiative balance that governs climate. Because they sit at the intersection of chemistry, physics, and environmental science, aerosols draw researchers from many disciplines into shared conversations. Conferences create space for those conversations to grow, allowing early findings to be tested against established knowledge and new methods to be compared openly. The Forum on Aerosols has long served that role, gathering scientists who approach the same microscopic subject from strikingly different angles and who rely on regular exchange to keep their work grounded, current, and connected to broader questions about a changing atmosphere and the communities affected by it.
Field studies of aerosols are often shaped as much by location as by laboratory design. Tropical coastal regions offer especially rich conditions for observation, where sea spray, rainforest emissions, biomass smoke, and long-range transported dust converge in a single air mass. Sampling in such environments requires patience, careful calibration, and respect for the complexity of the systems being measured. Researchers who work there return home with datasets that rarely fit neatly into existing models, prompting revision rather than confirmation. Forums like FOA provide a place to present those field campaigns honestly, including their surprises, so that the wider community can learn alongside the teams who spent months under sometimes difficult conditions simply to capture what the air was doing on a given day.
Indoor and workplace aerosol science has grown quietly but steadily alongside outdoor research. Studies of cooking fumes, cleaning products, industrial processes, and exhaled breath have reshaped understanding of personal exposure and ventilation. Where outdoor air can feel abstract, indoor air is immediate and personal, tying laboratory results to everyday health. This expansion has invited engineers, architects, public health specialists, and clinicians into the conversation traditionally led by atmospheric chemists. Conferences reflect that shift by welcoming abstracts that cross sectors and methods. A measurement made in a hospital corridor can speak to cloud condensation the same way a mountain-top spectrometer speaks to indoor chemistry, and shared sessions help researchers recognise the connective tissue between problems that, on the surface, look nothing alike but share a common physics of suspended particles.
Modelling aerosol behaviour remains one of the most demanding tasks in environmental science. Numerical simulations must capture emissions, chemistry, transport, deposition, and feedbacks with weather and climate, all at scales ranging from a single street canyon to the entire globe. Each step introduces uncertainty, and small errors can compound. Presenting modelling work at a forum offers a chance to expose assumptions to scrutiny from colleagues who use different tools, different inputs, and different validation strategies. Constructive critique is part of the field's culture, and conferences are where that critique happens most openly. The result is a slow but steady refinement of the models themselves, and of the community's shared sense of what counts as a defensible result in a discipline where direct observation is always limited and always precious.
Education and mentorship quietly sustain aerosol research across generations. Senior scientists bring decades of accumulated judgement, while graduate students and early-career researchers bring new instruments, new questions, and new urgency about questions of climate and public health. Forums like FOA make room for both, mixing keynote perspectives with contributed talks from emerging voices. Poster sessions, panel discussions, and informal gatherings often matter as much as formal presentations, especially for younger attendees finding their footing. The discipline depends on this continuity, on the willingness of established researchers to share methods, datasets, and sometimes long-standing disagreements. A healthy conference leaves behind not only proceedings and papers, but also the beginnings of collaborations that will shape aerosol science for years beyond the meeting itself, wherever those scientists next find themselves gathered around the same shared questions.
Full papers
Full papers were prepared by speakers following abstract acceptance and made available to registered delegates through the conference resources. Refer to the Speakers page for author details and presentation titles.