University receives gift to establish environmental engineering chair

The University of Minnesota’s Institute of Technology has received a gift from chemical engineering alumna Rose Ling to establish the Joseph T. and Rose S. Ling Chair in Environmental Engineering. The $2 million endowment fund will support outstanding faculty involved in environmental engineering research and education.

Efi Foufoula- Georgiou

Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, a McKnight Distinguished Professor in the University’s Department of Civil Engineering, will be the first faculty member to hold the chair. Foufoula-Georgiou is co-director of the University’s National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics funded by the National Science Foundation and is a former director of the University’s St. Anthony Falls Laboratory.

“I am honored to be named as the inaugural Ling Chair in Environmental Engineering,” said Foufoula-Georgiou. “The University of Minnesota offers unique opportunities to lead international efforts in solving environmental problems because of its cross-disciplinary approach to environmental research and education. I am proud to be part of the Institute of Technology faculty engaged in cutting-edge research at the interfaces of hydrology, eco-geomorphology, mathematics, and environmental engineering.”

Rose Ling recently established the new endowed chair in honor of her late husband, Joseph, who passed away in 2006. Joseph received his Ph.D. in civil engineering at the University in 1952. He later went on to a long and distinguished career as an environmental engineer at 3M. Rose received her master’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1951 and worked for many years as an engineer at General Mills.

This new gift for a college-wide chair builds upon support from the Ling family, including a previous gift to establish the Joseph T. and Rose S. Ling Professorship in the Department of Civil Engineering. 

“This gift to establish a new chair in environmental engineering continues our family’s support of the University and provides a lasting legacy in an area of research that was Joe’s lifelong passion,” Ling said.

Joseph Ling pioneered the “Pollution Prevention Pays” program at 3M in 1975, a program still in place today aimed at preventing pollution at the source rather than removing it after it has been created. According to 3M, the program has prevented more than 2.6 billion pounds of pollutants and saved more than $1 billion over the last 32 years. After his retirement from 3M in 1984, Ling spoke around the globe on the need to prevent pollution.

As the new Ling Chair in Environmental Engineering, Foufoula-Georgiou will work to strengthen research at the University on understanding the vulnerability and resilience of environmental systems in the natural and engineered environment. These include controlling environmental pollutants, floods and landslides, as well as improving ways to predict and manage environmental impacts from climate and land-use changes.

Foufoula-Georgiou holds a degree in civil engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece and a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the University of Florida. Her ground-breaking work on complex environmental systems has attracted attention from researchers in the U.S. and around the world. She has received numerous awards including the recent 2007 Hydrologic Sciences Award from the American Geophysical Union for her important and far-reaching contributions to space-time rainfall modeling and scaling analysis in hydrology.

“We are grateful for this gift to strengthen world-class research at the University in the important area of environmental engineering,” said Steven L. Crouch, dean of the University’s Institute of Technology, the college of engineering, physical sciences and mathematics. “This support will help us focus more attention on solving the ever-increasing environmental problems facing our world today.”