Marie-Odile Fortier

Dr. Marie-Odile Fortier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Construction at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas through the Sustainability in Arid Lands cluster hire. Previously, from 2018 to 2022, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Merced. From 2015 to 2018, she was an Assistant Professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry contributing to the development of interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate programs in Sustainable Energy, where she was awarded the college-wide Distinguished Teaching Award in 2017. She has a PhD in Environmental Engineering from the University of Kansas (2015), during which she was also a trainee in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship “Climate Change, Humans, and Nature in the Global Environment” program, and a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Engineering and Sciences from the University of Florida (2010). Dr. Fortier has taught Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels since 2016 using a parametric LCA approach. Dr. Fortier’s research focuses on the geographically specific life cycle climate change impacts of energy systems, including land use change and albedo change impacts. Her research group, the Geospatial Energy Resources and Life Cycle Assessment (GERLCA) lab, uses LCA, GIS, and mathematical modeling to investigate how the carbon footprint of different fossil, renewable, and biomass energy systems varies spatially. In 2021, she received an NSF CAREER award towards this research in developing new geospatial methodology for energy life cycle assessments.