PhD Candidate & Fulbright Fellow
My engineering research is defined by three themes: community engagement, planetary health, and highly constrained environments. I leverage my engineering training in both human-centered design and Operations Research to solve human and environmental health challenges through mathematically optimizing the allocation of shared resources, network flows, etcetera. For example, a classic problem type in my field is facility location – where should we locate ambulances in a county to ensure equitable response times for all residents? Where should we place pop-up vaccine centers to promote equitable vaccine access? Operations Researchers translate these problems from human language into math and then computer language. These problems are typically computationally difficult to solve, so we also find new mathematical tricks to solve them efficiently so that the results can be useful to stakeholders.

What is your education/career background?
I will soon be a quadruple Badger! I’ve obtained all my degrees at the University of Wisconsin. In 2018 and 2020, I graduated with my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biomedical engineering. In 2020, I started my PhD in industrial and systems engineering, earning my master’s in industrial engineering in 2022. I will finish my PhD this year. During my graduate studies, I have also conducted two exchanges at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, totaling more than 14 months there.
How have you navigated a career in STEM as a woman/underrepresented minority?
One day at a time. I have struggled tremendously with imposter syndrome throughout my graduate education. When your identities aren’t represented equally in the spaces you occupy every day, it’s easy, natural even, to feel fraudulent. I was often the only woman in a course project and even once the only woman in a whole course. Finding community is the best way I’ve found to cope.
What advice do you have for women/underrepresented groups pursuing an education/career in STEM?
- Strive to decouple your identity from your work.
- You never have to earn rest. Just rest.
- Take your time (if you can)–this is advice I received and took to heart early in my graduate education. The slower you eat, the more you taste the meal. Make sure you taste the feast (courses, conferences, fieldwork, study abroad opportunities, collaborations) in front of you! It will support your learning and help you maintain a better balance between the personal and professional.
- You can’t make a career mistake for the first 10 years of your career. You’re learning what you like and what you don’t. This is also advice I received from a mentor, and it felt like a weight was lifted the moment I heard it. There’s no pressure to make the perfect next move.
What do you enjoy most about your career/current role?
It’s fun! And every day is different. I feel lucky to have spent my whole higher education career at the University of Wisconsin because it’s allowed me to tap into all of the resources UW has to offer. I grew better and better at navigating the myriad opportunities and have made the most of them.
What does diversity, inclusivity, and equity look like to you in your job sector? How do you incorporate DEI in your position?
In engineering, I believe DEI shows up in two main ways: 1) the products, systems, and services we design; 2) the people and priorities guiding that design. Engineers hold immense power over our collective future. We are problem solvers, and when given a problem, we have a lot of say over the design choices and technical specifications of the solution. There are many examples of engineered solutions that don’t serve people fairly (e.g., automatic soap dispensers that don’t don’t work for Black people). Having diverse engineering teams and reaching out to the community during the research and testing phases of the design process are absolutely crucial to securing a safer and healthier future for all, not just some.
The nature of my research facilitates DEI. In all aspects of my work, I collaborate to engineer physical or system-level interventions that aim to achieve environmental justice and health equity for people living and working in exploited communities. This requires intentional, ethical, and sustainable community engagement. At UW, I pursued and participated in two year-long community-engaged scholarship programs, the Morgridge Fellows Program and STEM Public Service Fellows, during which I developed a robust understanding and conducted a critical analysis of community-engaged teaching, research, and service. I learned strategies for culturally responsive, inclusive, reciprocal, and asset-based collaboration, which I employ while working with our partner communities.
Further, in order to help make science available and beneficial to all, I believe that for each publication submitted to a renowned international journal, a written work should also be submitted to a local journal or other media outlet (in the local language whenever possible), a value I inherited from my ETH Zürich mentor Professor Tilley. I also strive to develop research outputs that can be published in an open-source format. My main dissertation research will be published on GitHub and also hosted on a public website for ease of access by international partners and members of the public or researchers who wish to scrutinize and/or build off the
work. Pursuing this type of open science invites a more diverse set of perspectives into the field of engineering and contributes to the dismantling of “Ivory Towerism” in academia.
Beyond community engagement, showcasing the intersection of global health, planetary health, and design and engineering provides visibility to the opportunities available in the field and inspires others, particularly young women scientists, to pursue this work–a phenomenon documented in the literature (Milgram 2011) and media. In fact, I have seen this phenomenon play out in practice: I led a lab course under the theme of Humanitarian-Centered Design and Innovation through Making in 2019. I tasked students with following a human-centered design process to devise solutions to challenges identified by collaborators from rural Kenya. The year prior, the theme was more generic–Design and Innovation through Making. Before arriving to campus, incoming students had to apply to one theme out of more than 60 options based on a short description of the intended course projects. In 2018, there were only five women who signed up for the course. In 2019, 13 of my 17 first-year engineering students were women.
What is your favorite way to unwind?
Walking my dog, preferably by water, trees, and wildflowers.