Amy Childress is the Walt Singer Endowed Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the ReWater Center at the University of Southern California. She is also Academic Lead for the Water Reuse Consortium, a unique partnership amongst three universities and the US Army Corps of Engineers ERDC-CERL. Her research and scholarly interests are in the areas of wastewater reuse and desalination to address the global challenge of freshwater scarcity. Most recently, Dr. Childress has investigated membrane processes for innovative solutions to contaminant and energy challenges; conceptual analyses of synergistic configurations of shared/integrated facilities; morphological, mechanical, and interfacial aspects of membrane materials; and novel approaches for brine reduction and energy recovery. She has led multi-disciplinary research projects and has received awards for research innovation, publication impact, technology education, and mentoring. In 2026, Dr. Childress was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering and in 2024 she received The Athalie Richardson Irvine Clarke Prize. Dr. Childress is a past president of the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors, a Fulbright US scholar, and recently stepped down from serving on the US EPA Science Advisory Board. She chairs and serves on expert panels for potable reuse and seawater desalination projects in the United States and abroad. Dr. Childress is co-editor of Desalination, co-editor-in-chief of Water Reuse, and serves on the advisory boards of other technical journals.