Georgia Woman Named 2022 MacArthur Fellow

ATHENS, GA — Jenna Jambeck, a 48-year-old environmental engineer from Athens, has been named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.

Jambeck is a College of Engineering graduate from the University of Georgia, according to the MacArthur Foundation. A co-creator of the Circularity Assessment Protocol, Jambeck is interested in eliminating plastic waste.

CAP is a toolkit utilized to asses material management systems in communities and to understand how consumer plastic gets into a community, how it is consumed and how it gets out of the areas, according to the foundation.

CAPs have been present in more than 30 cities since 2020 in countries such as Vietnam, India and the United States, according to the foundation.

Jambeck is also a co-developer of the Marine Debris Tracker, a system that allows people to report litter they find in their communities, Jambeck said in a video posted to the MacArthur Foundation site.

"Since plastic pollution is everywhere, it's really hard to collect data when it's so dispersed; and so, the tracker allows us to get a big picture of what it looks like around the globe," she said in the video.

"My hope for the short-term is that we can use science to inform policy. We can use data to create context-sensitive and locally-appropriate designs of interventions."

Jambeck said the long-term goal is to generate a "big systems change."

Jambeck earned a bachelor of science in 1996 and a doctorate of philosophy in 2004 from the University of Florida, according to the MacArthur Foundation.

Read more about Jambeck via the MacArthur Foundation.