ABOUT CHELSEA

Chelsea Thompson is an atmospheric chemist, science communicator, and graphic designer based in Boulder, Colorado. She currently serves as the Communications Lead for NOAA's Chemical Sciences Laboratory (CSL).

 

Chelsea was raised in a family of artists and spent summers growing up doing art projects with her aunt and uncle–one a professional oil painter and the other a professional graphic designer and illustrator. In high school, she selected Chemistry and Art as her science and elective concentrations in the International Baccalaureate program.

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After high school, Chelsea chose to pursue her scientific interests in college. She received a B.S. in Forensic Science with a Chemistry minor from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida. She then attended Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and earned her Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry under the mentorship of Prof. Paul Shepson. Her Ph.D. research focused on chlorine and bromine radical chemistry in the High Arctic leading to depletion of ozone and gaseous elemental mercury during Polar Spring. She spent two spring field seasons in Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska as a researcher and one summer season as the Science/Laboratory Manager at the NSF-funded field station. While in Utqiagvik, Chelsea was able to engage with the indigenous community and was privileged to help prepare native foods and participate in the Nalukataq annual whaling festival.

 

Upon completion of her doctorate work in 2012, Chelsea moved to Boulder, Colorado to begin a postdoctoral position at the University of Colorado’s Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research and was awarded an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. There she began studying oil and gas emissions and their impacts on air quality, including the unusually high wintertime ozone pollution in the Uintah Basin, Utah. In 2015, she joined the Tropospheric Chemistry group at NOAA CSL as a research scientist with CIRES, where she participated in the SONGNEX airborne project, measuring nitrogen oxides (NOy) and ozone over western U.S. oil and gas shale basins. From 2016-2019, she participated in the NASA Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission, flying four round-trip global circuits aboard the NASA DC-8 research aircraft measuring NOy and ozone in the remote atmosphere.

 

After a year in the private sector, Chelsea returned to CSL in 2020 and has moved into the role of Communications Lead for the Laboratory. In addition to this role, she also served as the Graphics & Layout Coordinator for the 2022 Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion report under the Montreal Protocol.

 

Chelsea has a passion for science communication and believes strongly in the power of visual communication to engage the public. As the Communications Lead, Chelsea is able to blend her scientific and artistic backgrounds to create illustrations, visualizations, and other products for publications, laboratory communications, public engagement, and international scientific assessments.