Past Funded Researchers

Older woman with brown hair smiles

Susan Murcott

  • Lecturer
  • MIT D-Lab

Susan Murcott, an environmental engineer with a focus on water, sanitation, climate change and health. She is a Lecturer in D-Lab where, for the past 12 years, she has been teaching D-Lab-Water, Sanitation, Hygiene (EC.715/11.474J) and more recently, D-Lab: Water, Climate Change, and Health (EC.719/EC.789). In spring of 2017, she co-taught D-Lab: Earth.

She has led MIT student teams in over 25 countries spanning five continentsFrom 2005 to the present, she founded and helped establish the non-profit organization, Pure Home Water, with Ghanaian partners, which has built a ceramic pot filter factory to provide safe drinking water in northern Ghana. . In 2014-2015, she led the water filter evaluation of the Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation (CITE), a five-year USAID-funded project, to evaluate technologies for the poor. In 2019, she was selected for “Committed to Caring (C2C)” recognition as one among those professors, who go above and beyond expectations to make a positive impact on the lives of students.

She was the principal investigator of a team, in partnership with the Environment and Public Health Organization in Kathmandu, Nepal, that invented and has widely disseminated the Arsenic Biosand Filter. Since 2016, she has been involved in MIT-funded emergency relief following the 2015 Nepal earthquake. Currently, with Jeff Ravel, she is the co-PI of a Year 2 JWAFs Solutions Grant. Year 1 of that grant is described here.

Murcott is the author of over 50 professional papers as well as the book Arsenic in the World: an International Sourcebook (IWA, 2012).

J-WAFS-funded projects

News