Rate My Professor Jean MacRae

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.