Sebastian David Eastham is an environmental scientist interested in the transport and impacts of pollutants and trace species over long distances through the atmosphere.

Sebastian received an MEng in aerospace and aerothermal engineering from Cambridge University in 2011, with a dissertation on nuclear fuel cycle optimization. Between 2011 and 2015 he studied at MIT's Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment, working on a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics dedicated to the human health impacts of high altitude emissions. This work included integration of stratospheric chemistry and physics into the Harvard GEOS-Chem atmospheric model, development of a health impacts model and assessment of the long-term surface air quality and UV radiation impacts of both aviation and proposed sulfate aerosol geoengineering techniques. He received his PhD from the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2015.

Sebastian worked with Daniel Jacob in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to investigate the failure of Eulerian atmospheric models to reproduce observed synoptic-scale transport of pollution in narrow plumes and quasi-horizontal layers. Although a typical response to low model fidelity has been to increase global grid resolution and thereby incur significant computational cost, Sebastian explored the theoretical causes for enhanced numerical dissipation in these atmospheric structures. The goal of this research was to identify new and efficient modeling techniques capable of accurately reproducing and maintaining the observed high chemical gradients over global distances without requiring prohibitively fine global grid resolutions. By enabling accurate representation of long-distance pollutant transport and chemistry, Sebastian worked to improve model accuracy with regards to intercontinental impact attribution.

Faculty Host

Daniel Jacob, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences