Dr. Landis joined Mines in August 2017 as the first Presidential Faculty Fellow for Access, Attainment, and Diversity. Previously, she was a full professor at Clemson University from 2015 through 2017 as the Thomas F. Hash ’69 endowed chair in sustainable development. There, she served as Director for Clemson’s Institute for Sustainability, which brings together interdisciplinary research, education, and business for sustainability. Dr. Landis spent her Associate Professor years at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainable Engineering in the Built Environment from 2012 to 2015. During her tenure at ASU she served as Director of Research for the Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management, Senior Sustainability Scientist for the Global Institute of Sustainability, Lincoln Fellow of Sustainable Development and Ethics for the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, and Tooker Professor of STEM Education for the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. Dr. Landis began her career as an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh after having obtained her PhD in 2007 from the University of Illinois at Chicago under the supervision of Dr. Thomas L. Theis.
Dr. Landis has developed a research program in sustainable engineering of bioproducts. Her research ranges from design of systems based on industrial ecology and byproduct synergies, life cycle and sustainability assessments of biopolymers and biofuels, and design and analysis of sustainable solutions for healthcare. Since 2007, she has led ten federal research projects and collaborated on many more, totaling over $30M in collaborative research. Dr. Landis continues to grow her research activities and collaborations to include multidisciplinary approaches to sustainable systems. Dr. Landis is dedicated to sustainability engineering education, outreach and diversity in STEM. She has established networking and mentorship programs at three different universities to advance diversity and STEM. She also works with local high schools, after school programs, local nonprofit organizations, extensions, and museums to integrate sustainability and engineering into K-12 and undergraduate curricula.
In addition to building and maintaining a successful sustainable products research group, Dr. Landis has spent her career promoting and supporting women and underrepresented minorities in STEM. Like many of her predecessors, her early work was voluntary and informal. She began encouraging women in STEM through volunteer and outreach programs as a graduate student, and took on informal leadership roles as an Assistant and Associate Professor. For example, in 2007 she started the first female faculty engineering group as an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Some of her early efforts included negotiation workshops, networking events, work-life balance discussion groups, and an impostor syndrome workshop. At Clemson University, Dr. Landis served as the Thomas F. Hash ’69 endowed chair in sustainable development and Director for Clemson’s Institute for Sustainability. In this role, Dr. Landis contributed in a formal capacity to improve opportunities for women and underrepresented students through the Institute. She established numerous successful programs in her short time at Clemson, including an undergraduate research program for underrepresented students, a graduate professional development program, and a workshop on communicating engineering for women. At Mines, Dr. Landis leads the President’s Council on Diversity, Inclusion, and Access, whose mission is to establish a strategic plan for access, attainment, inclusion, and diversity at Mines.