Rate My Professor Jean MacRae

Jean D. MacRae is an Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Maine College of Engineering and Computing, University of Maine, Orono. She earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering in 1997 and M.S. in Microbiology in 1991 from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, and a B.S. in Life Sciences in 1988 from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. MacRae's research specializes in microbial processes that influence pollutant and nutrient cycling in natural and engineered systems. Her interests encompass nutrient and metal cycling, including nitrogen and arsenic transformations; sustainability issues in water and sanitation for developing regions; materials management in circular systems; risks from PFAS and emerging contaminants in organics, wastewater residuals, and food waste recovery; aquaculture waste treatment for nutrient recovery and fish health; biogeochemical processes behind acid rock drainage and corrosion; field tests for environmental microbes and pathogens; and arsenic adsorption for drinking water treatment.

Affiliated with the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, MacRae contributes to initiatives on PFAS uptake in crops and soils, transformation of PFAS precursors, contaminated wastewater residuals management, circular economy exchanges, and sustainable PFAS drinking water treatment. She advises the University of Maine chapter of Engineers Without Borders, which has implemented sanitation and rainwater systems in Honduras and Ecuador. In teaching, she covers Fundamentals of Environmental Engineering, Wastewater Process Design, Environmental Microbiology, Water Pollution, and related advanced courses. In 2020, she received the Presidential Public Service Achievement Award. MacRae's impactful publications include highly cited papers such as 'Temporal changes in microbial ecology and geochemistry in produced water from hydraulically fractured Marcellus shale gas wells' (Environmental Science & Technology, 2014; 362 citations), 'Kinetics of cadmium uptake by chitosan-based crab shells' (Water Research, 2002; 324 citations), 'Microbial metabolisms in a 2.5-km-deep ecosystem created by hydraulic fracturing in shales' (Nature Microbiology, 2016; 295 citations), and recent works on PFAS uptake into lettuce, fescue, and tomatoes (Environmental Advances, 2025), cancer incidence links to arsenic in Maine drinking water (Journal of Water and Health, 2024), and safe circular food systems (Foods, 2024). Her scholarship advances environmental microbiology, remediation, and sustainable resource management.