Experts & Staff

Miriam Heller came to WRI as a visiting Senior Fellow at EMBARQ, The WRI Center for Sustainable Transport, from the University of Southern California where she was Director of Information Technology in the Washington DC Office of Research Advancement. From 2000 through 2006, Heller served at the National Science Foundation, initiating and directing programs on infrastructure and information systems. Specific competitions, some as large as $25 million, that she initiated and coordinated addressed: sustainable and resilient infrastructure, critical e-science middleware, cyberinfrastructure learning and workforce development as well as human and social dynamics.

Prior to NSF, Heller was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in France on leave from her University of Houston (UH) Industrial Engineering faculty position, pursuing research on sustainable infrastructure and environmental systems. As faculty, she also contributed to WRI’s Green Ledgers: Case studies in corporate environmental accounting. Before academia, Heller designed and implemented various industrial systems including environmental management systems at Digital Equipment Corp., a fraud warning system at Citibank Credit Services, and water quality and quantity systems as a consulting affiliate of Lyonnaise-des-Eaux in France.

In the early 1980s, her work as AAAS Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow at the Office of Technology Assessment played a role in the creation of the Toxics Release Inventory in the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act.