Diana Ginnebaugh

Diana Ginnebaugh is a postdoctoral scholar working on sustainable transportation at Stanford University’s Precourt Energy Efficiency Center. She is currently exploring innovative (personal) mobility, freight transportation, and state and federal policies and their impact on air pollution and climate change.  She completed her PhD in the Atmosphere/Energy program in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Stanford University in June 2012.  Her dissertation work was the innovative process of combining a near-explicit gas-phase chemistry mechanism with an extensive aqueous phase mechanism to model atmospheric chemistry in detail yet still be practical for 3-D modeling, the first time this has been done.  Diana used this model to investigate the urban air pollution impacts of using ethanol (E85) in flex-fuel vehicles.  Her findings include that the human health impacts of E85 in the urban environment are likely to be at least as bad as gasoline’s impacts for warm weather conditions and could be much worse than gasoline’s impacts for cold weather conditions, with or without a fog present.  In addition, in some cases with warm temperatures, a morning fog may cause a higher peak of ozone in the afternoon that would be present without the fog.  While at Stanford, Diana was a Mineral Acquisition Partners (MAP) fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. working on transportation advocacy in the summer of 2005.  From 2000 to 2004, Diana worked for the Dow Chemical Company as a production engineer and a project lead in a chlorine production facility.  Her significant accomplishments while at Dow included leading two projects of 6 to 8 people that dramatically reduced raw material usage and high temperature steam usage, with environmental and cost benefits of more than $1.75 million/year saved.  She also influenced management to create a permanent Energy Efficiency Focal Point position for the chlorine plant, which she filled for one year, with the overarching objective to continue to improve the energy efficiency of the plant operations. With a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, Diana enjoys a diversity hobbies/interests including playing water polo, volunteering for Save the Bay, and snow skiing with her husband and daughter, Athena.