The Air & Waste Management Association awarded Gautam Raghavendra Eapi, a UTA Ph.D. student in Civil Engineering, a highly competitive air quality research scholarship at the organization's national conference June 26. The Air & Waste Management Association (A&WMA) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan professional organization that enhances knowledge and expertise by providing a neutral forum for information exchange, professional development, networking opportunities, public education, and outreach to more than 5,000 environmental professionals in 65 countries.

Gautam is currently working on his Ph.D. dissertation entitled "Neural Networks for Ozone Forecasting." He is developing a single forecasting neural network model for multiple regions using hourly data for three years (2010-2012) from metropolitan regions in the U.S. such as Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, San Diego, and Los Angeles. This will be the first neural network model, to our knowledge, able to forecast ozone in multiple cities. Gautam is co-supervised by Dr. Melanie Sattler in Civil Engineering and Dr. Michael Manry in Electrical Engineering.