Profile

I live in Liverpool, did my degree in Chemistry and PhD in Atmospheric Science at The University of Manchester. I enjoy travel (back when we could), and these days try to pretend I’m travelling by cooking dishes from around the world. That’s also secretly why I chose to research in an area which involved lots of fieldwork, including trips to the China, Uganda and the US!

I work on studying the chemistry of the air we breathe.

This started out after my Chemistry degree, during my PhD, with a big fieldwork project in Beijing, China in 2016-2017. There, I took measurements of the pollution and then spent the past few years trying to understand what they meant!

I also did experiments in the lab, to try to understand my results and did more fieldwork in the USA and Uganda. The fieldwork is the most exciting part of my work, I got to work on the UK’s research aircraft (FAAM) with loads of other scientists which is filled with high tech scientific equipment to study the atmosphere. At times, we flew super low over the ground and ocean to measure emissions, which was scary at times, but super exciting!

Now, I work on studying the chemistry of pollution in our homes, figuring out how cooking and cleaning change air quality indoors.

You can see more about my work at architmehra.com

I’m not sure there was ever such a thing as a “typical day”, at least before COVID. During fieldwork, we would wake up, have breakfast and head down to our measurement site, making sure everything was working ok and looking at the data as it came in, making lots of graphs to try to understand where the pollution was coming from! When back in the UK, a day would sometimes have lab work, and other times I would spend hours at my computer screen working through the data to make interesting graphs and figure out what was going on. These days, I am spending a lot of time setting up a “lab kitchen” so we can cook in their and measure the chemistry as it happens!