Haruko Murakami Wainwright

Professor Haruko Wainwright is developing environmental monitoring, modeling and data analytics technologies for improving environmental resilience – to prepare for, respond to, and recover from environmental contamination – and sustainability – to minimize the environmental impacts of energy's waste streams. Her research focuses on environmental modeling and monitoring technologies, with a particular emphasis on nuclear waste and nuclear-related contamination. She has been developing Bayesian methods for multi-type multiscale data integration and model-data integration, applying real-time model-data integration approaches to improve environmental monitoring, including radiation, groundwater contamination and soil moisture. She also works on broader topics, including watershed science, environmental monitoring and remediation, radiation monitoring and restoration after the Fukushima accident, and nuclear waste disposal.

She joined the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2022. Before joining MIT, she was a Staff Scientist in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and an adjunct professor in Nuclear Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. She leads and co-leads multiple interdisciplinary projects, including the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Long-term Environmental Monitoring Systems (ALTEMIS) project, and theArtificial Intelligence for Earth System Predictability (AI4ESP) initiative.