Carly Sear

IGC FELLOW    |   Global Change Center

Ph.D. Student  •  Civil and Environmental Engineering

Advisors : Dr. Landon Marston and Dr. Alasdair Cohen

Research Interests: Drinking water quality, the intersection of environmental and public health, environmental justice, adapting to and mitigating challenges from climate change .

carlysear@vt.edu 

Carly is pursuing a PhD in Environmental Engineering, with a focus on Environmental and Water Resources. She is co-advised by Dr. Landon Marston and Dr. Alasdair Cohen to study the intersection of water resources with social, economic, and health outcomes.

Carly graduated with honors from Saint Louis University with a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering and minors in Environmental Science and Engineering Mathematics. At SLU, she was part of an environmental geochemistry lab that studied urban water quality in the St. Louis region, with a focus on the presence of microplastic and road salt contamination. Her interdisciplinary civil engineering capstone project was the design of a manufacturing training facility for an urban renewal development. As the designated environmental engineer, she designed a sustainable water system with green infrastructure and ensured the LEED certification of the project as a whole.

At Virginia Tech, Carly is studying water quality from private wells to better understand contamination patterns. The project uses large-scale data analysis to create a national mapping of contamination profiles, while also applying field sampling campaigns centered in rural, low-income Appalachian communities. The self-collected data will serve as a ground-truthing method to validate results from machine learning to be applied all across the country.

With the Interfaces for Global Change program, Carly hopes to approach climate change and public health through a more interdisciplinary lens and collaborate with student in other fields to develop holistic solutions to global issues.