The atmospheric particulate matter and/or aerosol impacts on health and climate: the effects are important but not completely known. In urban and rural/remote areas huge amounts of data are required to describe the chemical composition, the size distribution and the concentration time trends of this elusive pollutant. 

Our Laboratory, in the frame of international and national collaborations/projects, develops measuring and data reduction techniques to characterize the particulate matter (usually referred as PM10 and PM2.5), to single out long range transport events, to quantify the contribution of the species most interacting with solar radiation, to apportion the impact of specific “sources” (traffic, energy production, industries, natural processes) on the pollution levels, to study the relationship between air quality and bioaerosol (in particular bacteria and fungi). 

Our expertise goes from the size-segregated sampling, to the analysis of the particulate matter with gravimetric, optical, atomic, biological and nuclear techniques and to data reduction through receptor models and other statistical approaches. 

Finally, we have built the first Italian atmospheric simulation chamber: ChAMBRe