Yanna Lambrinidou

Yanna Lambrinidou

Yanna Lambrinidou is affiliate faculty in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech and cofounder of the Campaign for Lead Free Water. She works at the intersection of environmental health, community knowledge, and technical expertise. She served on the EPA National Drinking Water Advisory Council (NDWAC) Lead and Copper Rule (LCR) workgroup (2014-2015), advised former Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s Flint Water Interagency Coordinating Committee (FWICC) (2016), and testified at the US House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee hearing on the Flint water crisis (2016). She is cofounder of the Engineering Ethics and Community Rights Collaborative, a multi-stakeholder initiative promoting community rights in community-engaged engineering projects. She is coauthor of Crossing Over: Narratives of Palliative Care (Oxford University Press, 2023, Revised Edition). Her interest in risky virological research was triggered in March 2020 when she immersed herself in reading about the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2 and encountered reports in scientific journals and the media that the research-related hypothesis was a “conspiracy theory.” These reports struck her as premature, unscientific, and potentially an egregious weaponization of scientific power against a global community reeling from death, illness, and loss, and deserving honest answers.