Recently, Environmental Science & Technology Letters (ES&T Letters), a well-known journal in the field of environmental science and technology run by the American Chemical Society (ACS), announced the list of the 2022 Best Paper Award winners. The paper entitled “Revealing Drivers of Haze Pollution by Explainable Machine Learning” by the team led by Professor Yinchang Feng from the College of Environmental Science and Engineering of Nankai University won the 2022 ES&T Letters Best Paper Award. The best papers winners were nominated by the ES&T Letters team of editors and the Editorial Advisory Board members from all papers published in the journal in 2022, and a total of seven papers were selected for the Best Paper Award. This year, the ES&T Letters recognized Best Paper Award in three categories: Letters, Global Perspectives, and Brief Reviews. The paper by Professor Feng’s team is one of the two winners examined air pollution issues. It is also the only winner in the Letters category from Asia this year.

The results of the 2022 ES&T Letters Best Paper Award were announced on the cover of the latest issue of the journal and the editorial article issued on October 10, 2023

In recent years, Professor Feng Yinchang’s team has devoted to developing big data-driven air pollution prevention technology to support air quality management. A number of techniques have been developed and used to evaluate the efficacy of short-term regulatory actions during big events like national games and high pollution episodes. The award-winning paper combines machine learning algrithm and post-hoc feature attribution algorithm to quantify the contribution of emissions and meteorological factors to PM_2.5 air pollution. The paper was published in ES&T Letters as Supplementary Cover on January 4, 2022, and has been recognized as a highly cited papers in the ESI database.

Hou Linlu, a master student from the State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory of Ambient Air Particulate Pollution Prevention and Control, is the first author of the paper, and Dai Qili, Associate Professor in the College of Environmental Science and Enginnering of Nankai University, is the corresponding author. The co-authors of the paper also include scholars from the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom and Rice University in the United States.

ES&T Letters is a cutting-edge peer-reviewed journal for the rapid disclosure of urgent and impactful research results where immediate availability is of importance to the environmental science, engineering, and health community. It is founded by ACS in 2013 and serves as a companion to the longer-form Environmental Science & Technology journal. The impact factor of ES&T Letters is 10.9 in 2022.

Link to the paper:

Hou, L., Dai, Q., Song, C., Liu, B., Guo, F., Dai, T., Li, L., Liu, B., Bi, X., Zhang, Y., & Feng, Y. Revealing drivers of haze pollution by explainable machine learning. Environmental Science & Technology Letters, 2022, 9(2), 112–119. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.1c00865

Sources of information for ES&T Letters:

Bryan W. Brooks and William A. Arnold. Our Selections for the Best ES&T Letters Papers in 2022. Environmental Science & Technology Letters, 2023, 10 (10), 810–811. 

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.3c00667

（Edited and translated by Nankai News Team.)