Marccus D. Hendricks

Biography:

Marccus D. Hendricks is an Associate Professor of Urban Studies and (Environmental) Planning and Director of the Stormwater Infrastructure Resilience and Justice (SIRJ) Lab at the University of Maryland (UMD). He also holds appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Global, Environmental, and Occupational Health. In 2023, Dr. Hendricks served in the Biden-Harris Administration as a Senior Advisor for Climate and Community Resilience in the inaugural Office of Environmental Justice at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in the Executive Office of the President.

To date, his work has primarily focused on understanding how social processes and development patterns create hazardous human-built environments and vulnerable infrastructure, as well as the related risks and promising adaptation strategies associated with, for example, urban stormwater management and flooding, industrial releases and explosions, and sanitary sewer overflows. His work emphasizes participation and action and uses methods including photography, visual inspection, and environmental monitoring and sampling (e.g., water quality and quantity).

Dr. Hendricks’s environmental justice portfolio includes work on the ground with communities across the United States, primarily throughout the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeast regions. His research has been published in several journals, including the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Planning Education and Research, American Journal of Public Health, Environmental Justice, Journal of Infrastructure Systems, Risk Analysis, Journal of the American Water Resources Association, and Sustainable Cities and Society. In the popular media, his work has been covered by or quoted in the Associated Press, Washington Post, CNN, NPR, Bloomberg, USA Today, Scientific American, Huffington Post, Baltimore Sun, and AccuWeather, among others.

While at UMD, Dr. Hendricks has received numerous fellowships and awards. Most recently, he was named by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute as a 2026–2027 Radcliffe-Salata Climate Justice Fellow. Other fellowships have included those from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; the Federation of American Scientists; and the JPB Environmental Health Fellows Program at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He has delivered a TEDx talk titled “Citizen Participation in Rising Waters” at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana; was selected as one of 50 emerging leaders, or “Fixers,” in the 2021 Grist 50; has served on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Science Advisory Board (SAB); and was an author of the Social Systems and Justice chapter of the U.S. Fifth National Climate Assessment.

Dr. Hendricks is a founding fellow of the William Averette Anderson Fund (BAF), a national interdisciplinary organization working to address matters of representation in the field of disaster research, practice, and pedagogy, and a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. A native of Dallas, Texas, he holds a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Science and a Master of Public Health, both from Texas A&M University, and completed his undergraduate studies at the University of North Texas.

Affiliations:

Affiliated Research Faculty:

• Clark School of Engineering's Center for Disaster Resilience
• National Center for Smart Growth
• Environmental Finance Center