Dr. Tracy Fanara is an environmental engineer and research scientist with a BS, ME, and PhD from the University of Florida. Tracy spent almost a decade designing water systems around the world, before and during her research at UF, focused on water quality through stormchasing and sustainable design retrofit. Tracy the was the design engineer on two nationally winning EPA design teams, was a National Science Foundation SPICE fellow, and was selected as a Presidential Management Fellow.
Until recently, Tracy managing the Environmental Health research program at Mote Marine Laboratory where she developed citizen science programs, water treatment technology for earth and space, and redeveloped a website (visitbeaches.org), along with developing three apps for publicly available environmental data reporting with over 1.6 million users. Tracy joined NOAA in August as the Coastal Modeling Portfolio Manager where she manages United States ocean modeling efforts in pursuit of a unified earth systems model to gain a better understanding of our earth systems and threats to human lives and livelihoods in a changing world.
Tracy spends time outside of work on communicating science through her mission Inspector Planet (podcasts, classroom visits and public speaking), was recently Xylem YSI’s Mission: Water Hero and was featured in Marvel’s Unstoppable Wasp which led to her co-produced comic series, Seekers of Science. In addition to Saturday morning educational television programming on Fox, CBS and ABC, you may have seen her on The Weather Channel as an expert or on the show Weird Earth or on the Science Channel’s Mythbusters the Search and What On Earth?