Alison Bain

When atmospheric chemist Alison Bain looks back on her career path, she sees a winding road. “The advice I always try to give undergrads is to be open to different opportunities,” she says. “I’ve done all these different and seemingly unrelated projects, but you never know when things will come in handy.”These days, Bain works as an assistant professor at Oregon State University, where she studies the properties of single, nanometer-sized aerosol particles. Her work is expansive; Bain readily admits that it feels almost impossible to choose just one research project so early in her career.One of her projects aims to measure how the surface tension of aerosol particles changes with size and composition. Aerosol surface tension plays a key role in cloud formation, one of the most difficult things to predict in climate models. Understanding surface tension at the single particle level could help improve the accuracy of these models, Bain says. She is also studying atmospheric microplastics. Some of Bain’s past work showed that the tiny bits of plastic become more likely to absorb water as they age, potentially changing their optical properties in ways that could affect climate. Her research group is now artificially aging plastic particles with ultraviolet light to study those effects in more detail. And in a new collaboration, Bain is studying the optical properties of diamond dust. In principle, tiny diamond particles could be dispersed in the atmosphere, where they would reflect sunlight back into space and cool the planet. This controversial geoengineering