Marsha Wills-Karp Named Interim Head of DoGEE

Wills-Karp will succeed Ed Bouwer, the Abel Wolman Professor of Environmental Engineering, who has led DoGEE for the past nine years, serving three consecutive three-year terms as that department’s chair. Under Bouwer’s leadership, DoGEE has continued to be recognized as one the nation’s top ten undergraduate programs in environmental engineering and among the nation’s top ten graduate programs in environmental engineering/environmental health engineering.

Wills-Karp, who has a joint appointment in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, was a member of the School of Public Health faculty from 1990 – 2000 and returned to the university in 2012 when she was named chair of EHS. A highly accomplished scholar and educator, her research focuses on defining the environmental and genetic determinants of allergic airways diseases, such as asthma, and she has made substantial contributions to our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying allergenicity of common environmental allergens. She has also contributed to our understanding of the role of exposure to air pollutants such as PM2.5 to susceptibility to the development of asthma. More recently, she has been investigating how the gut microbiome alters susceptibility to allergen and particulate matter-induced asthma.