Yanna Lambrinidou is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at Virginia Tech and cofounder of the Campaign for Lead Free Water. Focusing on the problem of lead in US drinking water, she works at the intersection of engineering ethics, environmental health, and environmental justice. As a medical ethnographer, she developed a teaching module on ethnographic listening, titled “Learning to Listen,” which was named an exemplary activity in engineering ethics education by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).
Interested in how dominant values in the engineering profession might affect water insecurity in the US, she has been conducting ongoing research on engineers’ imaginaries of “the public” and community rights in community-engineer collaborations. In 2019, she partnered with engineer Nathan Canney to start a multi-stakeholder initiative on community rights in engineering interventions.
As an activist, she has served on the EPA National Drinking Water Advisory Council (NDWAC) Lead and Copper Rule (LCR) working group (filing the group’s sole dissenting opinion), and on the Policy and Infrastructure subcommittees of former Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s Flint Water Interagency Coordinating Committee (FWICC). In 2016, she testified at the US House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee hearing on “The Flint Water Crisis: Lessons for Protecting America’s Children.”
Selected publications
Lambrinidou, Y. 2018. When Technical Experts Set Out to “Do Good”: Deficit-Based Constructions of “the Public” and the Moral Imperative for New Visions of Engagement. Michigan Journal of Sustainability 6(1):7-16.
Katner, A. L., K. Pieper, Y. Lambrinidou, K. Brown, W. Subra, and M. Edwards. 2018. America’s Path to Drinking Water Infrastructure Inequality and Environmental Injustice: The Case of Flint, Michigan. In R. Brinkmann and S. J. Garren, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Sustainability: Case Studies and Practical Solutions, pp. 79-97. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lambrinidou, Y. and N. E. Canney. 2017. Engineers’ Imaginaries of “the Public”: Content Analysis of Foundational Professional Documents, 124th American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference & Exposition, Conference Proceedings (Paper ID #18325), June 25-28, Columbus, OH.
Lambrinidou, Y. 2016. On Listening, Science, and Justice: A Call for Exercising Care in What Lessons We Draw from Flint. Environmental Science & Technology 50(22):12058–12059.
Katner, A., K. J. Pieper, Y. Lambrinidou, K. Brown, C. Hu, H. W. Mielke, and M. A. Edwards. 2016. Weaknesses in Federal Drinking Water Regulations and Public Health Policies that Impede Lead Poisoning Prevention and Environmental Justice. Environmental Justice 9(4):109-117.
Riley, D. M. and Y. Lambrinidou. 2015. Canons Against Cannons? Social Justice and the Engineering Ethics Imaginary, 122nd American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference & Exposition, Conference Proceedings (Paper ID#12542), June 14-17, Seattle, WA.
Lambrinidou, Y., S. Triantafyllidou, and M. Edwards. 2010. Failing Our Children: Lead in US School Drinking Water. New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy 20(1):25-47.