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Prakriti is a third-year PhD student being co-advised by Prof. Javernick-Will (GPO) and Prof. Sherri Cook (Cook Research Group). She holds a master's degree in mechanical engineering (May 2022) from CU Boulder as well as a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from a small college in India. She was born and brought up in New Delhi, India.

Growing up in a big city in India and seeing first-hand its flailing infrastructure systems, a result of political corruption and a vehement lack of resources, instilled a strong sense of community service and humanitarian rehabilitation and resilience work in Prakriti, and she is now working at the GPO on a collaborative project with the (US) EPA to understand historical drivers and barriers to heretofore successfully implemented water reuse and reclamation projects around the country, with a view to build upon these pre-existing case studies and models to better understand prospects for future implementations. For this, she will be co-advised by Dr. Sherri Cook.

In the summer of 2022, Prakriti worked with the Colorado Senate as part of a summer fellowship for STEM students, to devise a legislative policy proposal over the course of 6 weeks of the fellowship; her project focused on understanding ways to implement a community-based participatory research program for wildfire risk mitigation from a behavioral economics lens. Previously, Prakriti worked in an air quality/atmospheric chemistry research group on several field projects to quantify trace greenhouse gases and aerosols that are hypothesized to be direct contributors to a changing atmosphere and rising temperatures.

Besides a strong passion for and motivation to work towards sustainability and on humanitarian causes, especially within the context of climate change, Prakriti is passionate about teaching tricks to her 5-year old orange tabby, Charak ("wise wanderer" in Sanskrit) and his younger brother Bob Marley, learning as many dance forms as possible within the course of a single human life, and maintaining a mentally and physically active, interested lifestyle despite the constraints of the times.

Preferred pronouns: She/her/hers

Education:

• M.S. in Mechanical Engineering, Â鶹ÊÓƵ, 2022
• B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, India, 2018

Presentations:

1. Conference poster; WateReuse Symposium 2023, Atlanta, GA, March 2023

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