Moala Keshei Bannavti

Moala Keshei Bannavti is a Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow whose research aims to address environmental injustice and inequities through interdisciplinary environmental science. Specifically, Bannavti’s doctoral work focused on air quality in public schools — an understudied part of the built environment — and developing new approaches to remediate airborne, semivolatile organic compounds in low-income, minority-predominant public schools. As a postdoc, she will continue her explorations of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) emissions, which have been linked to many diseases, including diabetes, respiratory diseases, and neurodevelopmental disorders, with a focus on the contamination of outdoor air surrounding Superfund sites like the Neponset River.