Robert Field

Robert Field obtained his PhD at Imperial College, London in 1995. His thesis work was used to inform the establishment of the United Kingdom’s (UK) new National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Benzene and 1,3-butadiene. In the late 1990’s he helped to develop the UK National Hydrocarbon Network while representing the UK on European expert panels that considered air pollution measurement methodologies. In 2002, after five years of helping to develop the School of Environment and Natural Resources (ENR) at the University of Wyoming (UW) he returned to Europe to work for the European Reference Laboratory of Air Pollution based in Italy. He co-managed, along with national health and environment agencies, the Population Exposure to Air Pollutants in Europe (PEOPLE) project. In 2006 he returned to UW and continued the development of the ENR curriculum. In 2008 Field established a new research program to assess the emerging issue of wintertime ozone in Sublette County, Wyoming. This work, initially considering the nature of this phenomena, developed from 2012 to focus upon better understanding of hydrocarbon emissions from oil and gas development. He is the principal investigator of a co-operative agreement that was established in 2013 with the U.S. Bureau of Land management for long-term monitoring to define background air quality conditions in Wyoming. He is the Assistant Director of the Air Quality Center at UW that was established in 2016 by the UW School of Energy Resources. After 2 years as Associate director of the Center for Global Studies at UW, he served as the interim Director during 2019. In this role he advanced international research performed by faculty and students from all colleges at UW. He teaches air quality for SER and water management as a study abroad class for the Honors College.