Innovations

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Marr studied how SARS-CoV-2 & other airborne pathogens could be transported in the air. She also did research on pollution in Mexico resulting in changes in some laws. She has developed sensitive multi-layer sensors to better research pollution and has demonstrated that viruses were more active in very high & relatively low humidity.

1978 started the Love Canal Parents Movement; was a primary organizer of the Love Canal Homeowners Association who brought wide public attention to the environmental crisis in Love Canal; her actions resulted in the evacuation of 833 families; founded the non-profit Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste in 1981 to help train and support local activists with their environmental work which was subsequently renamed the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice (CHEJ); has authored several books about the Love Canal story and the effects of toxic waste with the most quoted being "Love Canal. My story" written with Murray Levine and published in 1982 & 2 others-"Dying from Dioxin" (1995) & "Love Canal The Story Continues" (1998); her story was dramatized in the 1982 made-for-TV movie Lois Gibbs: the Love Canal Story, in which she was played by Marsha Mason*

1989 became the first woman to fly on a space shuttle mission after the Challenger disaster; 1991 took a role at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland working on a project called SeaWiFS, an ocean-monitoring sensor that measured global vegetation; 1971-1980 while working at Utah Water Research Lab her research included work on the productivity of the algal component of cold desert soil crusts in the Great Basin Desert south of Snowville, Utah; algal removal with intermittent sand filtration and prediction of minimum river flow necessary to maintain certain game fish and the effects of increased salinity and oil shale leachates on freshwater phytoplankton productivity; worked on the deployment of the Magellan Venus exploration spacecraft, the first planetary probe to be deployed from a space shuttle;

at Oak Ridge National Lab led several national climate change mitigation studies & was a leader in the analysis & interpretation of energy futures in the US; co-founder of Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance; served 2 terms (2020-17) as a Presidential appointee & regulator on the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority; created & leads the climate & Energy Policy Lab at Georgia Tech

In her dissertation, Williams sought to explore the factors that eventually lead to the erosion observed in the Anacostia River. Little had been done in terms of examining the upper and lower regions of the river and the basin sedimentation. The flooding of Bladensburg, Maryland precipitated the erosion and necessitated investigation. Williams concluded that, in addition to natural erosion, human activities, including deforestation, agriculture and urbanization, had accelerated the process. When the Industrial Revolution occurred, an abundance of trees offered a ready source of fuel, leading to mass deforestation in the regions surrounding the Anacostia River. Due to European settlement and agricultural processes that necessitated a mass deforestation of these trees, human activity was seen as the primary reason for the erosion which occurred in the Anacostia River. Marguerite’s assessment on the ways human activity leads to major environmental setbacks further denotes her significance in the geoscientific fields. As a result, she is considered to be one of the first scientists who scrutinized the impacts that humans have in deterring natural processes observed in the world.