Mary Pat founded Depave Chicago following years of collaborative design research carried out through The Water Lab on stormwater infrastructure, geological history, urban landscape studies, and community engagement in Chicago. That work was started while teaching at Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago) between 2011-2014 and draws upon previous practice for Peter Walker and Partners (Berkeley, CA) on public space design and Conservation Design Forum (Chicago, IL) on Chicago city-wide stormwater studies for industrial land and city streets. Her students won the first round of US-EPA’s Campus Rainworks Challenge, a national competition of green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) designs in 2013 and in 2019 an Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects for Calumet City GSI design research funded by IL/IN Sea Grant. Research and resources from the Chicago-Calumet Region study was extended into an Illinois State-wide web resource Illinois Groundwork.

Mary Pat is a member of the Greater Chicago Watershed Alliance, served on the Technical Advisory Team for the Natural Solutions Toolkit led by the Trust for Public Land, and has been a contributing member of the Calumet Stormwater Collaborative since 2014. She is co-editor of Fresh Water: Design Research for Inland Water Territories (AR+D, 2019), and has published peer-review research through academic venues and public media outlets such as The Plan Journal, Journal of Landscape Architecture, Landscape Journal, Environmental Research Infrastructure and Sustainability, LAF’s CSI Landscape Performance Series, NPR, Architects Newspaper, Streetsblog USA, Grist, Environmental Health News, and Next City. This work has been made possible by funding support through Wright Ingraham Institute, IL/IN Sea Grant (NOAA), US-EPA, Landscape Architecture Foundation, IL Extension Collaboration Grant, UIUC Campus Research Board, among others, and through the incredible collaborations of her students and partners. Start-up funding for Depave Chicago was awarded to her by the Walder Foundation Resilence x Nature program.