UVM's Meg Fay traces the health and equity impacts of the built environment
Meet UVM's Meg Fay!
Meet Meg Fay, a Civil and Environmental Engineering, M.S. student at the University of Vermont! Holding a B.S. in Environmental Science and B.A. in Chemistry, they currently study emissions exposure and equity impacts of the electric vehicle transition at UVM's Transportation Research Center.
Meg’s journey spans the overlaps between transportation, health, and equity. Their work shows how quantitative research can and should be centered around people and their experiences, especially in light of the history of environmental injustices in this country. Meg’s environmental research began after realizing the environmental remediation application of composites they designed for oil adsorption at Dr. Ian Wong’s lab at Brown University. They then joined Dr. Meredith Hasting’s lab to study the use of low-cost air monitors to measure neighborhood-level differences in air pollutants in Providence.
Meg’s work included collaborating with local sites with sensitive populations like schools and hospitals, installing the monitors, and calibrating the sensor data for particulate matter. That project has since grown into the Breathe Providence Network, a partnership between researchers and community organizations responding to the air quality needs of residents, particularly vulnerable and low-income ones.
“The real power behind my research is being able to provide data that supports what people already know about their lives. Everyone has a lived experience – someone could be living near a port, a bus stop, and they know the air quality is not good – but it’s hard to achieve policy initiatives if they don’t have the tools and data to support that. Having models and data that reflect the lived experiences that people are already having is one aspect of how I view my role as a researcher. The second aspect is bridging the disconnect between researchers and practitioners, figuring out how we can simplify our modern, accurate models to make evaluation of environmental issues easier for practitioners. They need to be able to do it not just when required, but whenever there may be a concern.”
It’s easy to trace the undercurrent in Meg’s research: a focus on the impact of our built environment on people's experiences, particularly with an equity lens. Their undergraduate experience led Meg to their current research at UVM Transportation Research Center. Meg is conducting a national analysis to evaluate the impact of electric vehicle (EV) adoption on air quality and environmental justice across U.S. communities. Using high-resolution, census-block-level forecasts, they examine how EVs and internal combustion vehicles will affect near-road emissions exposure and disparity and attempt to answer the following question — are EVs the answer to our equity problems?
Changes in emissions exposure and disparity among different demographic groups have serious implications for how EVs fit into the larger environmental justice effort. They hope to build out this dataset into a dashboard for the public, researchers, practitioners, and advocates to use.
“As a flexible system, there is a real potential with transportation where it can be redesigned to improve both environmental and public health – we can make a big difference here because transportation is such an integrated and ubiquitous system in all communities around the world.”
With transportation analysis being so important, Meg emphasized not only using publicly-available data in their research, but also making their research publicly accessible. One example of this is their own experience at Brown. Meg was a staff writer for The Triple Helix, an online scientific journal and blog that seeks to demystify academia and communicate science to the general public. They spoke on the need to make science stories understandable, accurate, and compelling to readers, framing them in a way that was immediately relatable to readers. One way to do this? Offer readers a way to do something about a problem, whether it be attending a local meeting or providing input to policymakers.
Meg also spoke on the importance of seeing young women interested in and succeed in transportation research. They have collaborated with three undergraduate students: Niki Tier, whose honors thesis analyzed the use of emission density as a surrogate for emission concentrations through ambient air quality modeling; Emma Jane Dreyer, who studied the inclusion of active travel in travel demand modeling and transport planning; and Kayt Lockwood, who is currently conducting case studies to further develop Niki’s air quality model thesis into a paper. Meg’s advice for undergraduates starting out in the environmental field is:
“The easiest work to do is the kind of work you find interesting. Don’t ignore little sparks of curiosity or interest, because it could turn into something really good. So much is expected of undergraduate students now, but if everyone’s focusing so hard on keeping themselves busy all the time, they aren’t actually figuring out what they want to do.”
Meg has been honored with a 2023 Voss Undergraduate Environmental Research Fellowship, 2024 WTS Vermont Graduate Scholarship, 2024 Dwight D. Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship, and 2024 Thomas J. Votta Graduate Scholarship for the Environment. They hope to work in a way that serves the public and continue to explore the intersection of public health and the built environment.
Congratulations on your achievements, Meg!