OVERVIEW

Professor Marguerite Nyhan is Full Professor of Engineering for Sustainability at the School of Engineering & Architecture at University College Cork. She is also a Research Affiliate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Marguerite directs the Nyhan Sustainable Futures Research Group which focuses on designing intelligent solutions for sustainable, net-zero, healthy, liveable and equitable cities of the future. Professor Nyhan’s research has been published in leading academic journals including Nature and Nature Cities.

Professor Nyhan received her BEng in Civil, Structural & Environmental Engineering from UCC in 2010 and her PhD in Environmental Engineering from Trinity College Dublin in 2015. While completing her PhD, Professor Nyhan conducted research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship at this time. Following her PhD, Marguerite was hired as a Post-Doctoral researcher at MIT and led the Urban Environmental Research Team within MIT’s Senseable City Laboratory. She was then a Post-Doctoral researcher at Harvard University’s School of Public Health. Later, she was recruited to work as a Research Scientist at the United Nations in New York City. There, she led ground-breaking research on the application of emerging technologies in global sustainable development and humanitarian efforts.

CURRENT ACTIVITIES

Professor Nyhan is interested in informing the design of sustainable, healthy and liveable cities of the future through the development and application of beyond-the-state-of-the-art technologies and methodologies. She has published widely on using complex ICT datasets and AI-derived computational techniques to evaluate urban dynamics and environmental metrics at city-wide scales; modelling air pollution emissions from transport; modelling urban air quality, urban greenspace and human exposures to these; and determining associations between environmental exposures and human health outcomes using epidemiological modelling methods. Her current work also focuses on climate and environmental policy.

As lead Principal Investigator, Professor Nyhan has been awarded over €7 million in funding for both ground-breaking research and pioneering educational programmes. Marguerite is lead PI on the nationally coordinated Sustainable Futures project which focuses on research-driven interdisciplinary sustainability education. Prof Nyhan established the Sustainable Futures Lab and founded and chairs the Sustainable Futures Forum at University College Cork. 

For more details, please see the Nyhan Sustainable Futures Research Group website: www.nyhanlab.org