I enjoy interdisciplinary collaboration.
Linda Waters is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in UMD’s CEE Department. She attended Webb Institute, a New York school for Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, for her undergraduate degree. After college, she wanted to switch gears to focus more on sustainability to help both people and the environment. She started at UMD in August 2020, pursuing her doctorate in Civil Engineering. She received her Master’s in Spring 2023.
Under her advisor Dr. Allison Reilly, Linda is researching the intersection of sustainability and disaster resilience. She is specifically interested in whether disaster reconstruction can be leveraged to promote sustainability and support equitable recovery. To this end, she has built a simulation of the building stock of Houston and flooded it to quantify the benefits of incorporating sustainability into disaster recovery.
Linda enjoys interdisciplinary collaboration with other researchers at UMD and other universities. Her favorite part of being a CEE student is the people she’s gotten to work with, both the other students in her research group and the faculty.
Linda is a member of the Graduate Student Council, and is also on the Graduate Student Government Diversity and Inclusion Committee. She has received numerous honors and awards, including the Best Master’s Research Award, the UMD Global Stewards Fellowship, the Clark Doctoral Fellowship, the Dean’s Fellowship, and the Flagship Fellowship. This semester, she also received the very prestigious Department of Energy Innovation in Buildings (IBUILD) Graduate Research Fellowship.
In her free time, Linda likes to crochet, knit, cook, bake, and garden. She also loves to travel internationally, and has visited many European and Asian countries. She recently traveled to Ireland and France. This coming Spring, she hopes to visit Japan. Linda plans to graduate in January 2025.
