George Mason University doctoral candidate Xiaorong Shan built her academic career around understanding air pollution—its sources, its evolution, and its impacts on community health. Shan’s interest in air quality is rooted in her early experiences growing up in a rapidly industrializing region of China, where environmental change was closely tied to economic development.
Now, as a newly selected Commonwealth of Virginia Engineering and Science (COVES) Policy Fellow, Shan will bring that expertise to the policy arena, translating her research into insights that can support decision‑makers across Virginia.
Shan, who studies in the Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering, specializes in long‑term air pollution exposure and environmental health. Her work integrates large-scale environmental data, atmospheric modeling, and population‑level analysis to understand how historical and contemporary pollution patterns shape public health outcomes.
Her research is guided by a set of fundamental questions: Where does air pollution come from? How does it disperse across communities? And how do environmental regulations alter these patterns over time? To answer these questions, Shan conducts national‑scale modeling, including an ambitious reconstruction of U.S. air quality trends from 1940 to 2020.
“My thesis is studying very long‑scale air quality: how air chemical components change and what the major sources are, and how they vary by environmental policy and regulation,” she said.
Because direct air‑quality measurements are limited or unavailable for early decades, Shan reconstructs historical pollution levels using data on power plants, industrial facilities, and fuel use, combined with meteorological modeling and source‑specific emission factors. She develops large-scale, computationally intensive models and uses George Mason’s Office of Research Computing cloud system to run millions of calculations efficiently, enabling high-resolution reconstruction of air pollution patterns across space and time. These models allow her to estimate concentrations of pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter, mapping how changes in technology, regulation, urbanization, and industrial activity have shaped air quality across regions and decades.
While Shan’s academic research spans the entire U.S., her COVES Fellowship proposal focuses more locally. She hopes to examine major pollution sources specific to Northern Virginia—industrial facilities, transportation corridors, and rapidly expanding data‑center development—and analyze how environmental regulations have affected air‑quality trends in the Commonwealth.
“I want to study how environmental policy and regulation impact different air‑pollutant sources in Virginia, and whether those policies have meaningfully improved air quality over time,” she explained.
The COVES Science Policy Fellowship, administered by the Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (VASEM), places emerging researchers in legislative offices, executive agencies, and nonprofits throughout the state. Fellows contribute analytical expertise to ongoing policy needs while receiving training in science communication, governance, and public‑sector decision‑making.
Shan will join the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality this summer in Richmond. “I will be working on environmental justice–related initiatives, including updates to the Environmental Justice guidance in the permitting process and supporting community engagement efforts,” she said.
Across her scientific research and upcoming policy work, Shan is motivated by a central goal: to ensure environmental data and modeling can inform meaningful, equitable decision‑making. Her selection as a COVES Fellow reflects both her technical expertise and her ability to translate complex environmental data into actionable insights—helping identify which pollution sources matter most and how regulatory decisions shape real-world exposure for communities across Virginia.