Helping to manage pollution
Mohamed Omar remembers the first time he emigrated, at 16, from his native Mogadishu, Somalia, to Lahore, Pakistan. The bustling city of 10 million, where Omar’s parents had sent him to attend school during Somalia’s protracted civil war, was the most polluted place he had ever seen. “If you walked outside in the morning, you could see huge clouds of smoke, almost a haze around the city,” said Omar, 39, now an environmental management engineer at Harvard’s Office of Environmental Health, Safety, and Emergency Management (EHSEM). “There were mountains of waste along the roads.” At the time, Omar had no idea he’d end up managing pollution for a living — or that in 2000 he would emigrate to New England, a move that brought its own environmental challenges. “Seeing snow for the first time in 2001 was kind of a shock,” Omar recalled. Yet despite a nomadic early life, Omar took to New England...