CCEE head appointed to NC Environmental Management Commission

Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper appointed CCEE Department Head and Professor Jackie MacDonald Gibson to the NC Environmental Management Commission. The commission is responsible for adopting rules for the protection of the state’s air and water resources. MacDonald Gibson will be officially sworn in during the commission’s September meeting.

In a press release, Cooper noted MacDonald Gibson’s special training and scientific expertise in hydrology and water pollution control. 

MacDonald Gibson joined CCEE in August 2022. Previously serving as professor and chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at Indiana University, Bloomington, she spent 12 years on the faculty of the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering in the Gillings School of Public Health at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has continued to conduct important water contamination research in the state over the years.

In her research, MacDonald Gibson parses complicated environmental problems into manageable elements that can be modeled mathematically and re-integrated to inform environmental and public health policy decisions. She has worked across the globe, from the U.S. to the United Arab Emirates, examining environmental risks to health at the scale of communities, building models that integrate knowledge of how pollutants are distributed through communities, how people become exposed to pollutants and other environmental risks factors, and how these exposures, in turn, increase risks of illness or premature death.

MacDonald Gibson’s accolades include being named an RTI University Scholar and receiving the IBM Junior Faculty Development Award and the Newton Underwood Award for Excellence in Teaching, Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering from UNC-Chapel Hill.

This post was originally published in the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering.