When Lauren Lowman saw a job posting at Wake Forest that said, “We are a liberal arts engineering department,” she knew she needed to apply. As an engineer with a deep appreciation for the liberal arts, Lauren not only focuses on the quantitative, but she encourages her students to understand the consequences of what they design and put into the world.
At Wake Forest, Lauren serves as an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and has been on the faculty since 2018. Lauren also leads the Environmental Dynamics Lab at Wake Forest, a lab that focuses on how extreme weather events and variability in precipitation affect vegetated ecosystems. The goal of her research is to explain how physical water, energy and carbon exchange pathways modulate ecosystem responses under different extreme events (e.g., hurricanes, droughts, and fires). This interdisciplinary research intersects the fields of engineering, physics, biology, chemistry, hydrology and ecology, and combines numerical modelling, remote sensing, geospatial data analysis and field experiments. Her work receives funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Lauren is also passionate about developing and sharing inclusive teaching practices in STEM fields. As a founding faculty member of the Wake Forest Engineering Department, she developed new interdisciplinary curriculum that bridges engineering fields and reflects the Wake Forest University motto of Pro Humanitate. In 2020, Lauren received an Engineering Unleashed Fellowship from the Kern Family Foundation to support this work. As a consultant in engineering education, Lauren has trained over 250 faculty members across the U.S. since 2021.