Katie Chan

she/her

Post-Baccalaureate Research Assistant, UCLA. B.S. Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, 2025

Katie Samantha Chan is a first-generation Latina student from the San Fernando Valley with a B.S. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS) and a minor in Geospatial Information Systems and Technologies from UCLA. During her undergraduate years, she served as President of Undergraduate Chi Epsilon Pi, her department’s undergraduate student organization and honor society. Entering UCLA in 2021, she was a member of the Program for Excellence in Education and Research in the Sciences (PEERS) and was involved in the Academic Advancement Program (AAP).

Katie also held leadership roles in the Center for Education Innovation and Learning in the Sciences’ Learning Assistant Program, serving as both a Pedagogy Head and Course Coordinator. In these roles, she facilitated collaborative learning in upper-division AOS courses to foster supportive classroom environments. Katie conducted summer research in 2024 at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she assessed the performance of the MITgcm model in simulating bottom water dynamics in the San Pedro Basin to better understand the transport of DDT-contaminated sediments from historical ocean dumping sites. She presented this work through the ASLO Multicultural Program at the 2025 Aquatic Sciences Meeting.

At UCLA, she also conducted undergraduate research in the Aerosol-Climate Interactions Group, focusing on the role of mineral dust as an efficient ice-nucleating particle in Arctic mixed-phase clouds. This work has implications for climate intervention strategies, particularly in assessing the potential of Arctic cloud seeding as a geoengineering approach. During her senior year, Katie was awarded the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program fellowship to support her research and received the Dean’s Prize for Excellence in Research at UCLA’s 2025 Undergraduate Research Week.

Over the summer, she interned at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where she characterized the ice-nucleating potential of ambient aerosol and sub-pollen particle samples collected at the Bankhead National Forest atmospheric observatory using cold-stage freezing experiments. Returning to UCLA as a Post-Baccalaureate Research Assistant, Katie will begin researching the effects of volcanic ash on ice crystal formation in Arctic clouds. This natural experiment provides an opportunity to assess how volcanic aerosols influence cloud properties and helps quantify the potential impacts of purposely seeding mixed-phase clouds as a geoengineering strategy.