Atlanta’s pollutants create a perfect research setting for Jennifer Kaiser, an assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech. Kaiser leads research focused on the emissions and chemistry of air pollutants, working to understand how nature and humans contribute to air pollution. Understanding those processes, she said, will help local, regional and global leaders make better policy.

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.