Marccus Hendricks

Dr. Hendricks’ primary research interests include infrastructure planning and management, social vulnerability to disaster, environmental justice, risk analysis, sustainable development, public health and the built environment, and participatory action research. He takes a mixed-methods approach to his research that includes both quantitative and qualitative methods such as multiple regression, cross-sectional research, spatial mapping, in-depth interviewing, participatory action research, and different forms of spatial and analytic epidemiology, among others. At the intersection of his work, he uses a combined social vulnerability to disaster and environmental justice framework, to ensure that low-income and communities of color are planned and accounted for, emphasizing participation and action, in light of everyday urban stormwater management and extreme events such as urban flooding and investigates the socio-spatial dynamics related to the inventory, condition, and distribution of critical infrastructures and public works, mainly water infrastructure (i.e. stormwater, wastewater, and drinking water) and green space, can modify risks of hazard exposure, resulting disaster impacts, public health outcomes, and opportunities for community resilience.

To date, he primarily has worked to understand how social processes and development patterns create hazardous human-built environments and vulnerable infrastructure and the related risks in urban stormwater management and flooding using secondary data analysis of spatial thematic layers. He has developed and implemented participatory actions, methods, and techniques that create and advance sustainable design, planning, and development decision making of communities to mitigate risks, achieve healthier, more equitable places and resilient natural, built, and social environments.

Hendricks has received two early-career awards from both the National Academies of Science Gulf Research Program and The JPB Environmental Health Fellows Program at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He also participated in a congressional briefing entitled “Addressing the Impact of Climate Change on Public Health and Natural Disasters” on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and was quoted from his participation in Scientific American. He has also been featured in public media on the local morning show Get Up DC and Grist Magazine discussing the Ellicott City, MD floods. His research has been published in several journals including the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Infrastructure Systems, Risk Analysis, Landscape Journal, and Sustainable Cities and Society.

Hendricks is a founding fellow of the William Averette Anderson Fund (a national interdisciplinary organization working to increase the number of underrepresented persons of color in the field of disaster research, practice, and pedagogy) and currently serves as a board member for the Fund. He holds a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Science and a Master of Public Health, both from Texas A&M University. He completed his undergraduate work at the University of North Texas.