Virginia Tech professor named MacArthur Fellow

Linsey Marr, a university distinguished professor and the Charles P. Lunsford Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech, on Wednesday was named one of this year’s 20 MacArthur Fellows.

A prestigious award known as the “genius grant,” the fellowship is awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in recognition of excellence, originality and dedication to their fields, ranging from writing, visual arts and music composition to scientific research. The fellowship comes with an $ 800,000 award that recipients can use with no strings attached to further their work.

In an interview last year with Virginia Business, Marr, an environmental engineer, said she “toiled in obscurity” while studying airborne illnesses beginning in 2007, but her knowledge was in high demand with the start of COVID-19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and the White House sought her out, and she published more than 20 research papers in 2020. The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) also recognized her as a 2022 Outstanding Faculty member. Earlier this week, she was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering’s class of 2023.

Marr earned her Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley, after receiving her bachelor’s degree at Harvard. She conducted postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before coming to Virginia Tech.

“I hope we can look back on this period as the era of peak air pollution,” she said in a statement provided by the MacArthur Foundation. “As we move away from fossil fuels and begin designing buildings to have good air quality, we will shift toward cleaner outdoor and indoor air. We should take advantage of this moment of greater public awareness, rich scientific knowledge and technological advances to kick off a clean air revolution.”