Marccus Hendricks

Marccus D. Hendricks is an Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Environmental Planning and Director of the Stormwater Infrastructure Resilience and Justice (SIRJ) Lab at the University of Maryland. He’s also affiliated with the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Global, Environmental, and Occupational Health. In 2023, he served as a Senior Advisor for Climate and Environmental Justice in the Biden-Harris Administration at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).

Hendricks has over 15 years of experience in environmental planning and infrastructure engineering. He has worked with communities across the U.S., primarily in the southeast, mid-Atlantic, and northeast. To date, he has worked to understand how social processes and development patterns result in hazardous human-built environments, vulnerable infrastructure, and the associated risks and promising adaptation strategies related to, for example, urban stormwater management and flooding, sewer overflows, industrial releases and explosions, and other types of environmental contamination, as matters of environmental justice.

Currently, he co-leads an interdisciplinary team that has been on the ground actively collecting data, including water and soil samples, and responding to the Potomac sewage spill near Washington D.C., estimated to be the largest sewage spill in U.S. history, as part of a multi-year project that originated from pilot work he began in 2018 on infrastructure, sanitary sewer overflows, and basement backups.

While at UMD, Hendricks has received fellowships and career awards from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and The JPB Environmental Health Fellows Program at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. His work has been covered by or quoted in the Washington Post, Associated Press, CNN, NPR, Bloomberg, USA Today, and Scientific American, to name a few. Hendricks has a TEDx talk titled “Citizen Participation in Rising Waters;” was selected as one of 50 emerging leaders or “Fixers” in the 2021 Grist 50; served on the U.S. EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) from 2021-2023; and is an author on the Social Systems and Justice chapter of the U.S. Fifth National Climate Assessment. He has a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Science and a Master of Public Health, both from Texas A&M University.