Urooj Amjad, PhD (Fall, 2011)
December 27, 2011
Urooj Amjad, PhD
Postdoctoral research associate
Environmental Sciences and Engineering
The Water Institute at UNC
Rainwater is collected for household use in this West Bank town of Beit Sahour, Palestine. Photos by Michael Shade.
Urooj Amjad’s original inspiration for working on water issues was to explore water’s use as a tool for cooperation rather than conflict. In 1998, she researched Israel-Palestine water management issues. In emphasizing cooperation, she explored her related interest in how societies adapt to difficult political, economic and environmental circumstances.
“Water management is a window to understanding these complicated and life-relevant issues,” Amjad says. “Inspiration for continuing my research on water issues evolved toward providing water services for all household water users and the efficient management of our resources. As a society, we design formal and informal rules to guide our behavior for desirable outcomes. Understanding the relationship between the intentions, rules that get us there, and the desirable outcomes are motivation for me to analyze institutional behavior, regulation and policy, as I did more recently in the fully privatized water sector in the U.K.”
Carolina Public Health is a publication of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health. To view previous issues, please visit www.sph.unc.edu/cph.
