Environmental Sciences and Engineering
- Understand the environmental transport and transformation of chemicals and infectious agents.
- Protect vulnerable populations from toxic exposures.
- Mitigate the impacts of climate change on air, water and health
- Create a healthy, sustainable and equitable future.
Health equity in the transition to clean energy, safe drinking water for vulnerable children, protection from infection where we work and play, economically feasible actions with co-benefits for public health and climate sustainability — this work to create a healthy, sustainable, and equitable future is uniquely possible at Gillings, where engineering, science and public health are found together, and where health equity has always been a central part of our mission. Increasingly, the faculty and students of the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering (ESE) are responding to, planning for, and working to mitigate new and evolving public health threats – that oftentimes have a disproportionate impact on marginalized communities. Some of these threats include viruses and toxic compounds in the air we breathe, hazardous agents in contaminated floodwaters, antibiotic resistance, air pollution exposures from drought-enabled wildfires, changes in water availability in low-income countries, extreme weather-impacts on the financial health of local water districts and prenatal exposures to legacy and emerging contaminants. Upon graduation, our students join over 2000 ESE alumni furthering knowledge and leading evidence-based changes in environmental and public health practice and policies. Our graduates take with them an integrated, interdisciplinary, quantitative, mechanistic education that links health risks back to sources. They are engaged in efforts to improve environmental quality locally and globally, including through technological innovation, effective environmental policies, research, and community engagement. ESE has an internationally recognized faculty in air pollution, environmental health sciences and toxicology, climate change and health, global water policy, infectious disease and microbiology, environmental chemistry, complex systems modeling, energy systems, risk assessment, water resource management, and engineering. We are home to UNC’s Water Institute, Center on Financial Risk in Environmental Systems, the Institute for Environmental Health Solutions, and participate in UNC’s strong university-wide environmental and climate change communities. Since its founding, the Gillings School of Global Public Health has been a consistent advocate for health equity locally and globally. Read more about our department.
Our History
Our work today builds on ESE’s long tradition of local and global impact.
We are the nation’s first engineering department in a school of public health. We enrolled our first Sanitary Engineering master’s student, Roy Jay Morton, under Thorndike Saville in the fall of 1920, when there was a pronounced need to improve water safety in the towns and cities of N.C. ESE was a founding department of UNC’s School of Public Health (1940) under Herman Baity. Within the first 50 years of our history, international aid organizations were sending students from several continents to be educated by the department, and an estimated 25% of graduates were addressing water and sanitation challenges in international health organizations and foreign governments, including African and Latin American countries (based on a survey of graduates in 1971). Three of the first four Directors of Environmental Health at the World Health Organization were our alumni. Under the leadership of Dan Okun (1955-1973) and continuing under Russell Christman (1973-1989), ESE became a truly interdisciplinary department, providing a quantitative education in environmental sciences and engineering, with substantial faculty expertise spanning sciences, engineering, management and policy domains in air, water, and industrial hygiene. The department’s current name was adopted in 1962 and William Glaze (1989-1997) added faculty in the health sciences.
If anything, the past decade has shown that stove-piped responses will not deliver the long-term, sustainable results we need. Engineering solutions to household water service provision, for example, must be done within the broader context of a one-health approach to meaningfully reduce water-related diseases. As collaborative environmental scientists and engineers located within the top public school of public health, ESE is ideally positioned to provide holistic, intersectoral responses to mitigate and prepare for the pressing environmental challenges. We do this by characterizing susceptible populations, assessing health risks, creating technological and policy options with co-benefits for health and sustainability, and proactively engaging communities. Thus, we celebrate a century of environmental solutions to public health problems, and we affirm our commitment to build public health resilience to climate and environmental change.
Students fund their education through a combination of sources including loans, fellowships and awards, assistantships and grants. Several awards and scholarships are supported by generous contributions from donors to the School and University who value the current and future contributions of our students.
Contact: Sarah Kitchens, Funding and Awards Coordinator, sarah_kitchens@unc.edu
Career Opportunities
