Mercury Fate and Transport in the Global Atmosphere

Nicola Pirrone is Director of the Institute for Atmospheric Pollution of the Italian National Research Council (CNR-IIA) and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Environmental and Health Sciences of the University of Michigan. He is Chair of the UNEP Global Partnership for Mercury Air Transport and Fate Research, Chair of the WG on Global Atmospheric Mercury Models Intercomparison within the Task Force on Hemispheric Transport of Air Pollutants (TF HTAP) of the UN-ECE-LRTAP convention and Chair of the CEN-TC264 WG that is preparing the European Standard Methods for monitoring mercury concentrations in ambient air and precipitations. He has been Chair of the European WG that prepared the Air Quality Position Paper on Mercury that is one of the scientific background documents of the Forth Air Quality Daughter Directive of the European Union. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles on different topics associated to atmospheric transport, chemistry and policy relevant issues related to major at-mospheric pollutants. Robert Mason is a Professor at the University of Connecticut with a joint appointment in the Departments of Marine Sciences and Chemistry. His research focus is the cycling of mercury in the biosphere with emphasis on the atmosphere and on air-sea exchange and redox reactions in the atmospheric boundary layer and the surface ocean. In addition, his research has a focus on mercury methylation in coastal ecosystems and other environments. Mason has an active research group with currently 4 PhD students and a post-doc. He is the author/coauthor of about 100 papers on mercury and is actively involved in a number of national and international mercury initiatives. Mason obtained his undergraduate and Master's degree in South Africa and his PhD at the University of Connecticut in 1991. He was a professor at the University of Maryland before returning to the University of Connecticut in 2005.