What if there was a way to reliably decontaminate water without using chlorine and generating the resulting disinfection byproducts?

Put simply, Jackie Knee wants to make people healthier. She’s worked at that singular goal in rural Thailand as a Fulbright Fellow, in the United States at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and at Georgia Tech as a fifth-year Ph.D. student in environmental engineering. Once she finishes her degree later this year, she’ll continue it in Britain as the 2019 Marshall Sherfield Fellow.

Professor John Crittenden and President Emeritus G. Wayne Clough have helped chart the course for the future of environmental engineering in a new report from the National Academy of Engineering. Environmental Engineering for the 21^st Century: Address Grand Challenges lays out five grand challenges facing society that environmental engineers are uniquely positioned to address — but answering these challenges will require an evolution in environmental engineering education, research and practice, according to the report.

Water and land for growing crops are hard to come by in urban areas. Finding more sustainable methods for growing produce in urban areas would have enormous benefits. A pilot project by Georgia Tech’s Yongsheng Chen, a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, aims to use wastewater from the campus to do just that.