Meet the Team
Meet the Team
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Lauryn A. Spearing, PhD
Lauryn A. Spearing, PhD
Tufts University
Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Lauryn Spearing, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Tufts University. She received her PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Spearing uses a systems thinking approach, involving both qualitative and quantitative methods, to understand complex problems at the intersection of technical, social, and natural systems. Her research focuses on three broad areas: 1) infrastructure management during uncertain contexts; 2) understanding public perceptions towards the built environment; and 3) sustainable water technology adoption. She has worked on various complex engineering problems such as: managing infrastructure interdependencies in rural Alaska, understanding community impacts after the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment, and exploring how population dynamics impact the built environment.
Andrew Whelton, PhD
Andrew Whelton, PhD
Purdue University
Professor of Civil, Construction, Sustainability, and Environmental Engineering
Andrew Whelton, Ph.D. is a Purdue University professor of civil, environmental, and ecological engineering, who is a nationally recognized environmental engineer with 20 years of experience in the infrastructure, public health, and environment areas. At Purdue, he leads the Healthy Plumbing Consortium and Center for Plumbing Safety, and several other initiatives with multiple university and industrial collaborators. His teams have also responded to support communities devastated by wildfires. Over the past two decades, his teams have positively changed how government agencies (EPA, CDC, NRC, NIOSH, NIST), water utilities, nonprofit organizations, health departments, state legislatures, and building owners approach their responsibilities. A hallmark of Professor Whelton’s work is his direct assistance to communities at risk. Throughout his career he has worked to share knowledge with the public, industry, and government officials so better decisions and policies can be made. He has organized and presented town hall meetings, contributed to public press, scientific literature, and presentations, and provided government agencies public messaging and press conference advice.
Deborah Sunter, PhD
Deborah Sunter, PhD
Tufts University
Associate Director of Civic Studies at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life
After receiving her doctorate, Deborah Sunter advanced her understanding of energy policy as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy. Combining her interests in science and policy, she became a postdoctoral fellow in the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California-Berkeley, and joined the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. At Tufts University, she uses computational modeling and data science techniques to explore the interface of technology innovation and policy for improved environmental sustainability and energy justice.
Sanjay Mohanty, PhD
Sanjay Mohanty, PhD
UCLA
Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Sanjay Mohanty, PhD is an associate professor of Environmental Engineering at the University of California Los Angeles. His lab group examines the effect of anthropogenic and climate stressors on the biogeochemical processes in subsurface soil and applies that knowledge to design climate-resilient nature-based treatment technologies for polluted water and soils.
Samantha Fried, PhD
Samantha Fried, PhD
Tufts University
Associate Director of Civic Studies at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life
Dr. Samantha Jo Fried is Associate Director of Civic Studies at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. She is also a Research Assistant Professor at Tisch College. In these roles, she develops curricula and educational resources, teaches and advises students, oversees budgets, plans and runs programmatic events and faculty governance, and does some community partnership work, research, and grant-writing. To this project, she brings expertise in archival and ethnographic research, experience conducting philosophical discussions about knowledge (e.g. "What is knowledge? What makes something a fact? How can universities co-create knowledge responsibly?" — this includes reading, presenting, and leading classroom discussions on these kinds of questions), alongside experience in community-university partnerships.
Elizabeth Beyer, MS
Elizabeth Beyer, MS
Tufts University
PhD Student, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Elizabeth Beyer is a Ph.D. student in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts University. She received her Master of Science in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech in 2025 and dual Bachelor's degrees in Biological Engineering and Spanish from North Carolina State University in 2022. Her research focuses on the intersection of human, engineering, and environmental systems. She is interested in how policy impacts people, infrastructure, and nature, and how evidence can be translated to policy for better outcomes. She uses both quantitative and qualitative methods in her work, including systems modeling, agent-based modeling, and natural language processing.
Joseph Toland, PhD
Joseph Toland, PhD
Tufts University
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Joseph Toland is a postdoctoral researcher in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts University. His research investigates human–infrastructure interactions in disasters. Through a socio-technical systems lens, he combines qualitative analysis with mixed-methods approaches in spatial data science, modeling, machine learning, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to understand the connections between communities and their infrastructure. The goal of his research is to improve infrastructure management, strengthen public policy and emergency management, and build community resilience to protect public health and safety during complex, multi-hazard disasters. His work draws on more than 20 years of practical experience in emergency management, including response to over (50) domestic and international disaster deployments with FEMA and DHS, natural hazards research with the USGS, coordinating emergency food and water distribution with the Red Cross, and supporting humanitarian relief efforts with USAID and the UN Health Cluster during the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
Cristiane Ferrarezzi, MSc.
Purdue University
PhD Student, Department of Environmental and Ecological Engineering.
Cristiane Ferrarezzi is a Ph.D. student in Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University. Her research focuses on the intersection of environmental engineering, public health, and community resilience, with an emphasis on how environmental contamination during disasters affects human health and decision-making. Her current work investigates VOC contamination in plastic baby products and community recovery following disasters.
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