Alumni

Margaret (Peggy) Layne, Walter Lynn, David McNelis, Pat Mulholland, Ray Oglesby, Rob Shimp, K. Hosny Mancy, Anthony (Terry) Rolan, Billy Turner, Brian Ramaley, James Edzwald, David Johnson, Des Lawler, Greg Allgood, Alan Rimer, John Young, Virginia S. Houk, Marjorie Aelion, Doug Owen, Charles Rodes, Pete Kolsky, Leonard A. Smock, Gerald Speitel, and Stephen Morse, M. Katherine Banks (flyer), Chris Schulz, Andrea Dietrich, Grace Robinson Hyde (flyer), Marla Smith-Nilson, Hua Wang, Jian Zhen Yu, David Pinsky, P.E. (ESE, MSEE, 1983).

In the years following UNC, I worked at a social entrepreneurship research institute to gain a more complete picture of the challenges facing international development. I soon saw the role of innovation and innovation management as being a crucial skillset to create meaningful interventions, support organizational learning and provide a systematic way of creative problem-solving. Since then, I have focused my career on supporting organizational and regional innovation capacity building. In my current role, I support universities, governments and corporations through strategic advising, innovation training and innovation ecosystem development.

Nonetheless, despite the long, tough slog, my North Carolina Ph.D. has afforded me many opportunities that I otherwise would not have had. First of all, I hold a reasonably prestigious, secure, and well-paying job as a tenured professor. Being a university professor is a great job, and no two days are the same. I get to work on a college campus and live in a college town. Other than a few hours a week when I have classes, my schedule is very flexible.

In addition to the other rewards of teaching and research, I have gotten to do many other things that I otherwise would not have gotten to do, including consulting, testifying, serving on government panels, and seeing most of the U.S. and much of the rest of the world.

One of the most personally and professionally rewarding times of my life was living with my young family for five months in the Netherlands while I was on sabbatical, fulfilling a life-long dream of living and working in Europe.

Finally, seeing your former students graduate, mature, and become leaders in their profession is very rewarding.

Between traveling to South America during undergrad and doing a series of undergraduate research programs in water/wastewater research areas, I started to appreciate the complex and interdisciplinary nature of environmental engineering work. Dynamic ecosystems of water, air and soil have kept me on my toes continuously learning throughout the past 10+ years.

From summer undergraduate research programs at VT and semester research at Illinois, I started to build a foundation on water-related research areas, focuses and needs. From there I attended UNC and continued my research interests.

In between my two years at UNC, I was granted a fellowship to take my research to Perth, Australia as part of the NSF EAPSI program – an incredible program to say the least.

Upon graduation, I moved on to work for GE in their EHS division focusing on corporate environmental issues/affairs, appreciating a different approach in environmental protection through industrial manufacturing and service operations.

Today, as a field engineer for Oasys Water, I have transitioned back to my educational roots working at an exciting startup deploying forward osmosis based desalination systems globally, treating some of the dirtiest and most challenging industrial wastewaters in power generation and oil and gas markets. I have worked on running pilot tests in the US and commissioning full-scale demonstration plants in China.

As my career continues to evolve, my educational roots mixed with various skillsets and my passions have been critical in shaping my career as it is today.

In 2016, she was a Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine where she worked with the Gulf Research Program and learned more about the links between science and policy.
In her current role as a public health policy analyst for the Maryland Department of Health, Hannah drafts reports and updates public health regulations for the State of Maryland. She facilitates conversations between public health subject matter experts, Department leadership, and legal experts. She also identifies bills of public health importance and drafts position papers on their public health impact during the legislative session. As a public health policy analyst, she enjoys working on a wide variety of public health topics and learning first-hand about how state-level public health policies are created.

My love of science, weather, and a desire to help the most susceptible and vulnerable populations led me to pursue an Environmental Studies degree as an undergraduate at UNC (class of 2003) and focus more specifically on the health effects of air pollution while pursuing an MSPH in Environmental Health Sciences (class of 2009) at UNC SPH. Through work at the US EPA on topics associated with exposure science and environmental justice, I ultimately decided to pursue a PhD in Environmental Health Sciences, where I recently finished at New York University (class of 2015). The desire to protect and improve public health has stuck with me, which is exactly why I enjoy my current position back at the US EPA as a Health Scientist in Air Quality Policy.