James Allerton is a Scientist in the Air Quality and Aerosol Metrology Group (AQAM) within the Atmospheric Environmental Science Department at NPL. He spent the first ten years of his NPL career in Fibre Optics & Photonics (Electromagnetics), and gained a year’s experience as a Science Impact writer with EURAMET before joining AQAM in 2019. His work within the group comprises a mix of air quality instrument calibration for internal and external customers, on- and off-site technical support, science outreach activities, and a variety of airborne particulates-related research. In respect of the latter activity, James helped initiate the Group’s involvement in the relatively new field of airborne environmental DNA (eDNA) capture/analysis, supporting partner laboratories in the effort to improve and validate eDNA-capture techniques required for global biodiversity monitoring.
James has a Master in Science degree and a PhD in experimental X-ray physics, supervised by Professor Moreton Moore, both undertaken at Royal Holloway College, University of London. James is also a Member of the Institute of Physics.
Areas of interest
- Airborne particulates (pollutants, biomonitoring via bio-aerosol capture)
- Air quality instrumentation calibration methods
- Science outreach and communication
Featured paper
Littlefair, J. E., Allerton, J. J., Brown, A. S., Butterfield, D. M., Robins, C., Economou, C. K., Garrett, N. R., & Clare, E. L. (2023). Air-quality networks collect environmental DNA with the potential to measure biodiversity at continental scales. Current Biology: CB, 33(11), R426–R428.