Professional Appointments
Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Future Sustainability & Environmental Engineering
School of Engineering & Architecture, MaREI Centre for Energy, Climate & Marine and Environmental Research Institute, University College Cork
Previous Appointments & Education
United Nations – Research Scientist
Executive Office of the Secretary-General, United Nations, New York City, United States
Harvard University – Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, United States
Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Post-Doctoral Researcher & Urban Environmental Research Lead
Senseable City Laboratory, Department of Urban Studies & Planning, MIT, Boston, United States
Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Visiting PhD Student & Fulbright Scholar
Trinity College Dublin Ireland – PhD in Civil & Environmental Engineering
University College Cork Ireland – BEng in Civil & Environmental Engineering. First Class Honours Degree Awarded. Interned at the Irish Environmental Protection Agency
Biography – Dr Marguerite Nyhan
Dr. Marguerite Nyhan is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Future Sustainability & Environmental Engineering at University College Cork. Dr. Nyhan is also a Principal Investigator at the Environmental Research Institute and a Funded Investigator at the MaREI Centre for Climate, Energy and Marine. Since joining UCC in 2019, Marguerite has won 5.1 million euro in funding as lead PI.
Dr. Nyhan founded and directs the Future Sustainability Research Group, which pursues frontier research focused on the development of intelligent solutions for sustainable, zero carbon, healthy, liveable and equitable cities of the future.
While conducting her PhD in Environmental Engineering in Trinity College Dublin, Nyhan was invited to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship. Following the completion of her PhD, she was hired as a Post-Doctoral researcher at MIT and led the Urban Environmental Research Team within MIT’s Senseable City Laboratory. Subsequently, Nyhan was hired as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Harvard University’s School of Public Health. Later, she was recruited by the United Nations in New York City.
With expertise in environmental engineering, urban analytics and public health, Marguerite is interested in understanding how new and emerging technologies including data analytics and AI can be harnessed in the design and optimization of zero carbon, sustainable, healthy and liveable cities of the future. Nyhan has published groundbreaking research on the application of ICT-technologies in understanding urban dynamics and urban environmental metrics at city-wide scales; in modelling emissions and human exposures to air pollution and greenspace; and in determining associations between exposures and human health outcomes using environmental epidemiological modelling methods. Her work has also focused on harnessing emerging technologies for sustainable development and humanitarian efforts.
Marguerite lectures in environmental engineering, systems thinking for sustainability and in data analytics. She leads the 3.9 million euro Sustainable Futures project and set-up and directs a number of university-wide and inter-institutional postgraduate programmes in Sustainability in Enterprise.
Marguerite’s work has been featured extensively in the media, including in the Guardian newspaper, NPR, the Irish Times and the Irish Independent. She has spoken to a range of audiences globally; from lecturing at MIT and Harvard, and giving two TEDx talks in her home country of Ireland to addressing the United Nations Environment Assembly in Kenya.