About
Victoria Bennett manages a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) project at RPI entitled, “Development of a Multi-scale Monitoring and Health Assessment Framework for Effective Management of Levees and Flood-Control Infrastructure Systems.” Victoria has co-taught Experimental Soil Mechanics with Professor Abdoun and will teach Introduction to Geotechnical Engineering in the fall of 2013. She has expertise in field-testing and has published several papers on field instrumentation for geotechnical engineering (Machan & Bennett, 2008; Bennett et al., 2011). Victoria serves the Transportation Research Board (TRB) as Committee Secretary to the Committee on Soils and Rock Instrumentation and Communication Coordinator for the Committee on Modeling for the Design, Construction, and Management of Geosystems.
Publications
The following is a selection of recent publications in Scopus. Victoria Bennett has 56 indexed publications in the subjects of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Engineering, Engineering.
News
The Equity & Infrastructure Seminar Series (Flint Water Crisis)
The Equity & Infrastructure Series is an ongoing co-curricular seminar and teaching initiative organized around the Civil and Environmental Engineering introductory course sequence. The series is developed as a recurring effort to connect technical engineering education with questions of environmental justice, engineering ethics, public decision-making, and community trust.
The basic structure pairs a shared case study with linked course activities. Students engage with a common read of Anna Clark’s The Poisoned City, attend talks by engineers, scientists, advocates, educators, and public-health experts, and complete assignments that ask them to connect the Flint Water Crisis to professional responsibility, infrastructure decision-making, and the communities served by civil and environmental engineers.
The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy by Anna Clark is a 2018 book that provides the first full account of the Flint water crisis, detailing how the city's water supply was switched to the Flint River, leading to lead contamination due to a lack of corrosion control, and the subsequent health disaster.
The initiative is intentionally distributed across the CEE "Intro" curriculum (sophomore spring). Rather than treating ethics as a single stand-alone topic, Equity & Infrastructure series places a shared public infrastructure case alongside students’ technical coursework in their introductory CEE courses: Water, Structures, Transport, Geo and Environmental engineering. Students examine what happened in Flint, identify the professional responsibilities of engineers, connect those responsibilities to codes of ethics, and reflect on how similar issues appear in other infrastructure systems and communities.
The series is designed to make visible a broader account of engineering practice. Technical decisions about pipes, water chemistry, testing, design standards, maintenance, and public safety are also decisions about institutions, communication, accountability, and whose concerns are "heard". By placing engineering analysis next to questions of public health, governance, and community advocacy, the Equity & Infrastructure Seminars asks students to consider infrastructure not only as a physical system, but also as a social and ethical commitment.
A central purpose of the initiative is to help students develop a more complete sense of what it means to become an engineer. The series emphasizes that civil and environmental engineers do not simply design systems; they serve publics, interpret evidence, communicate risk, make judgments under uncertainty, and participate in decisions that can either reinforce or repair inequities. In doing so, the series aims to build students’ engineering identity around responsibility, care, technical competence, and public trust.
Participating speakers & seminar topics
• Anna Clark — The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy
American journalist with ProPublica; author of The Poisoned City.
• Jason Dolmetsch and Jude Smith-Rachele — Engineering Decision-Making and Its Impacts on Public Health
Dolmetsch is President of MSK Engineers. Smith-Rachele is Co-Founder and CEO of Abundant Sun.
• Marc Edwards — Lessons from the Aftermath of the Flint Water Crisis
Virginia Tech professor and researcher on water quality.
• Elin Betanzo — Engineering Ethics and the Flint Water Crisis
President and Founder of Safe Water Engineering LLC.
• Ronnie Levin — How I Got EPA to Replace 9 Million Lead Pipes
Instructor at the Harvard School of Public Health.
• Darren Lytle — Lead Service Line Identification and Associated Challenges
U.S. EPA environmental engineer working on drinking water management and lead service line identification.
• Kimberly L. Jones — Water Justice: Issues of Water Quality Inequities Across the USA
Howard University Associate Provost and professor.
• Richard Fernandez — Restoring Our Most Sacred Resource
Professional engineer with Aquario Engineering LLC.
• Jona Favreau, Greg Campbell-Cohen, Rob Hayes, and Aaron Vera — Local Lead in Water Crisis Panel Discussion
A local panel bringing together resident advocacy, community organizing, environmental advocacy, municipal engineering, and consulting engineering perspectives.