Melissa Bilec

Dr. Melissa Bilec is the George M. and Eva M. Bevier Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Co-director of the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation. In October 2022, she was named as the Special Assistant to the Provost for Sustainability. She has led the University of Pittsburgh’s greenhouse gas inventories since 2008, and she serves on the Chancellor’s Sustainability Council which informs the climate strategy and actions for the university. Dr. Bilec has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles and secured over $20 million in funding. Her research focuses on the sustainable built environment and healthcare. She is committed to exploring how the built environment and healthcare can be integral to climate change solutions. She views the world and her research using a systems-level approach and is an expert in life cycle assessment. Using this view, she integrates critical built environment modeling approaches from building energy modeling to indoor air quality to develop robust strategies to mitigate climate change and deleterious environmental and human health impacts. She is working to solve the global waste challenge by advancing and developing circular economy principles, since the built environment is a major consumer of resources and waste producer.