Anu Ramaswami, an interdisciplinary environmental engineer recognized as a pioneer and leader on the topic of sustainable urban infrastructure systems, will deliver the 2024 Frank L. Parker Distinguished Professor Lecture on Tuesday, March 19. The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is host of the Parker Lecture Series.
The talk—Urban System Science for Sustainable, Healthy & Equitable Cities—will begin at 3 p.m. in Jacobs Believed in Me Auditorium (Room 134) in Featheringill Hall. A reception in Adams Atrium will follow the lecture, which is open to the public.
Ramaswami is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton University. She leads the Urban Nexus Lab, which explores how seven key sectors—providing water, energy, food, buildings, mobility, connectivity, waste management, and green and public spaces—shape human and environmental wellbeing, from local to global scales. Her work integrates environmental science and engineering, industrial ecology, public health and public affairs with a human-centered and systems focus. In 2019, she was appointed inaugural director of Princeton’s M.S. Chadha Center for Global India.
In a commentary article in One Earth, she presents a framework for examining cities’ infrastructure systems and linking them to outcomes in the areas of environmental sustainability, human health and wellbeing, economy and security, and distributional equity. “Linking concepts of basic needs and sufficiency with empirical measures of infrastructure performance and equity and with environmental footprints will be a powerful instrument for cities to advance inclusive well-being for all,” she said.
Ramaswami has served as lead PI and director of several flagship interdisciplinary National Science Foundation programs focused on developing sustainable infrastructure and cities in the U.S., India and China. Ramaswami is the lead principal investigator and director of the $12 million NSF-supported Sustainable Healthy Cities Network.
Ramaswami is a member of the UN Environment’s International Resource Panel and the NSF’s Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education (AC-ERE) and serves on the editorial board of Nature Sustainability. Her work has been published in Nature Climate Change and Science, as well as in top disciplinary journals, and distilled in policy-oriented reports of the United Nations and the World Bank. She is also the recipient of the 2022 Science Award from the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists.
Ramaswami earned her Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. She was on the faculty of the Colorado School of Mines, the University of Colorado-Denver and the University of Minnesota before joining Princeton in 2019.
The Frank L. Parker Distinguished Lecture Series honors the life and accomplishments of the late Frank Parker, an internationally recognized expert and pioneer in nuclear waste remediation. He was a Distinguished Professor of Environmental and Water Resources Engineering, Emeritus, and professor of civil and environmental engineering, Emeritus, at Vanderbilt University.
In 2019, she was appointed inaugural director of Princeton’s M.S. Chadha Center for Global India.
Dr. Ramaswami is an interdisciplinary environmental engineer recognized as a pioneer and leader on the topic of sustainable urban infrastructure systems. Her work explores how seven key sectors – that provide water, energy, food, buildings, mobility, connectivity, waste management and green/public spaces – shape human and environmental wellbeing, from local to global scales. She brings expertise across multiple disciplines: environmental science and engineering, industrial ecology, public health and public affairs, with a human-centered and systems focus.
The Frank L. Parker Distinguished Lecture Series honors the life and accomplishments of Frank Parker, an internationally recognized expert and pioneer in nuclear waste remediation and Distinguished Professor of Environmental and Water Resources Engineering, Emeritus, and professor of civil and environmental engineering, Emeritus, at Vanderbilt University.
Contact: brenda.ellis@vanderbilt.edu