Meet The Team

Dr. Melissa Bilec is the William Kepler Whiteford Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Co-director of the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation. Dr. Bilec has published 139 peer reviewed articles and secured $12 million in funding, including 15 National Science Foundation grants. She is committed to exploring how the built environment can be an integral part of climate change solutions. She views the world and her research using a systems-level approach, and she is an expert in life cycle assessment. Most recently, she is working to solve the global waste challenge through the advancement and development of circular economy principles, since the built environment is a major consumer of resources and producer of waste.

Dr. Bilec is committed to diversity, inclusion, and equity. She is working to advance the issues around and the solutions to environmental justice in the City of Pittsburgh. Dr. Bilec is co-leading her department’s Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access committee. She is also the co-faculty advisor for Pitt Society for Women Engineering. She was awarded the School of Engineering Diversity Award 2017-2018 and received Senior Vice Chancellor for Engagement’s Partnerships of Distinction award in 2019.

Dr. April Dukes is the Faculty and Future Faculty Program Director for the Engineering Educational Research Center (EERC) and the Institutional Co-leader for Pitt-CIRTL at the University of Pittsburgh. April also collaborates on the national educational research initiative, the Aspire Alliance’s National Change. April's research and teaching efforts engages graduate students, postdocs, and faculty to inform and support systemic change towards excellence and inclusivity in higher education.

Miss Jessica Vaden is a PhD Candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh where she is a STRIVE Scholar. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) in Chemical Engineering in 2019 where she was a Meyerhoff Scholar (M26). She received her Master of Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 2022. Her research work is interdisciplinary with focuses on sustainable engineering, empowering communities about air quality, environmental justice, and engineering education efforts to create inclusive classrooms and programming under the broad theme of improving the environment to improve people’s quality of life.

Kristen Parrish is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Chair for the Construction Management and Technology degrees in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, one of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. Prior to joining ASU in 2012, she was a Scientific Engineering Associate in Building Technologies at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

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Parrish’s expertise is in energy efficient building design and construction. In particular, she explores how non-technological barriers to energy efficiency influence design and construction processes and develops novel approaches to address these barriers. In recognition of her contributions in this area, she was asked to serve as a leader for the Architectural Engineering Institute's Sustain Technical Group, a position she has held since 2020. Parrish has co-developed three tools that assist capital project teams in planning their projects, and has supported efforts to integrate energy efficiency into design standards and guidelines at ASU and other institutions. 

Finally, her work explores how to create more inclusive classrooms and cultures for engineering and science at ASU and beyond. She has completed multiple projects for the National Science Foundation on these topics, each of which confirm the importance of an inclusive environment for increasing the retention of women and under-represented groups in engineering. Parrish has taken on leadership roles in this space as well; she serves as the Chair of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering Inclusion Faculty Advisory Council (IFAC) and as Associate Director of the RISE (Research in Inclusive STEM Education) Center at ASU.  

Amy is a faculty developer in the Trefny Center. Originally from Colorado, she earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Colorado State before going on to earn her Ph.D. in Engineering Education and MEng in Mechanical Engineering from Virginia Tech. Amy’s research interests include engineering students’ professional development and efforts to support underrepresented students within engineering, primarily using qualitative research methods to investigate a variety of perspectives on these topics. She has also done research on conceptual understanding in engineering courses and studied the variation in cultures between engineering departments and disciplines. In addition, while at Virginia Tech, Amy taught first-year engineering courses, worked in the Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity, and worked with graduate students to incorporate contemporary pedagogical practices in a variety of fields. 

Amy Landis is Mines first Presidential Faculty Fellow for Access, Attainment and Diversity. Previously, she was a full professor at Clemson University from 2015 to 2017 as the Thomas F. Hash ’69 Endowed Chair in Sustainable Development. She served as director of Clemson’s Institute for Sustainability, which brings together interdisciplinary research, education and business. Landis was an associate professor at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainable Engineering in the Built Environment from 2012 to 2015. During her tenure at ASU she served as director of research for the Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management, senior sustainability scientist for the Global Institute of Sustainability, Lincoln Fellow of Sustainable Development and Ethics for the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics and Tooker Professor of STEM Education for the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. Landis began her career as an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh after earning her PhD in 2007 from the University of Illinois at Chicago under the supervision of Thomas L. Theis.

Landis has developed a research program in sustainable engineering of bioproducts. Her research ranges from design of systems based on industrial ecology and byproduct synergies, life cycle and sustainability assessments of biopolymers and biofuels and design and analysis of sustainable solutions for health care. Since 2007, she has led nine federal research projects and collaborated on many more, totaling more than $30 million in collaborative research. Landis continues to grow her research activities and collaborations to include multidisciplinary approaches to sustainable systems. She is dedicated to sustainability engineering education, outreach and diversity in STEM. She has established networking and mentorship programs at three different universities to advance diversity and STEM. She also works with local high schools, after-school programs, local nonprofit organizations, extensions and museums to integrate sustainability and engineering into K-12 and undergraduate curricula.