Civil engineering professor Linsey Marr appointed to visionary committee tackling 21st-century issues
Linsey Marr, a professor in the Charles Edward Via Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in Virginia Tech's College of Engineering, was selected to become one of 18 new members of a national committee that aims to use engineering and science to comprehensively address global issues.
The National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering has convened a Committee on Grand Challenges and Opportunities in Environmental Engineering and Science to bring together leading thinkers of different backgrounds to identify problems and opportunities to improve quality of life around the world.
In 2008, the Grand Challenges for Engineering Committee announced a list of 14 grand challenges, including such ambitions as providing access to clean water, providing energy from fusion, and developing ways to capture and store excess carbon dioxide to slow global warming.
Marr was selected to bring her expertise to the Committee on Grand Challenges and Opportunities in Environmental Engineering and Science, where she will work with colleagues to find solutions to pressing environmental issues.
“I’m honored to have been selected for this committee because its output will help chart the future of environmental engineering,” Marr said. “Historically, sanitation has been the biggest environmental risk for disease, but air pollution has recently overtaken it, and I bring an interdisciplinary perspective centered around air pollution to the committee.”
Marr, who was recently awarded a Fulbright fellowship, is an expert in air quality and health whose research interests include characterizing the emissions, fate, and transport of air pollutants in order to provide the scientific basis for improving air quality and health.
She also conducts research on the environmental fate of nanomaterials and airborne transmission of infectious diseases.
She received a New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health in 2013 and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation in 2006.
Marr received a B.S. in engineering science from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from University of California, Berkeley.
Written by Erica Corder
