Dr. Wiacek is cross-appointed in the Departments of Environmental Science as well as Astronomy & Physics at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. She is interested in remote sensing of atmospheric trace gases involved in air pollution and climate and also in the climate effects of aerosol (suspended particles) through cloud interactions. Her research includes the development of ground- and satellite-based remote sensing instrumentation and data analysis techniques (retrieval algorithms and inverse theory).
She is currently establishing the Tropospheric Remote Sensing Laboratory (TRSL) to characterize atmospheric composition in the planetary boundary layer at SMU and in the field, with the end goal of improving the understanding and prediction of atmospheric processes. Dr. Wiacek helped establish the Toronto Atmospheric Observatory as part of her Ph.D. studies at the University of Toronto. She then researched aerosol-cloud interactions as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute (ETH) in Zürich. Finally, she held the position of Research Associate (remote sensing of aerosols) at Dalhousie University in Halifax before joining SMU in 2013.