Hometown: New Delhi and Fremont
Double Major: Data Science & Civil and Environmental Engineering
Domain Emphasis: Sustainable Development and Engineering
Data Science in Six Words: For avail: data tools. Never gone.
After growing up in New Delhi, India, where air pollution was a daily concern, Garima came to Berkeley committed to taking on environmental injustice. After stumbling on data science, she discovered that combining the major with sustainable development and engineering gave her the tools she needed to make a difference. “I think where the opportunity lies in solving environmental problems is combining our empirical knowledge with the data that we have in the sensing of the world around us to figure out what we don't know, what we know, and how we can use that to solve problems,” she said.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you end up majoring in data science?
I accidentally sat in on a Data 8 class because I showed up early to another lecture. It was really awesome. The first examples that we learned about, one of them was from Little Women and the other was about the cholera outbreak that John Snow studied. I loved literature and I had studied public health stuff in high school and so both those were really exciting to me.
What will you remember about studying data science at Berkeley?
One of my most interesting data science memories actually happened way, way outside the classroom. It happened on a road trip with Claire Dubin, who's also a data science major. We were driving through the American Southwest over winter break. We ended up talking about data science and how we used it in our respective fields. Claire is a yeast aficionado; she studies yeast genomics and the data science of that. And I studied satellite data, but we're both interested in the environment. So that was really awesome being able to talk about these concepts and point at things that we were looking at on the road and identify how our work and our studies were relating to that and how we were using data to understand big and small changes, all towards creating a better understanding of the world around us. Day five of a road trip in New Mexico and we were still excited about talking about data.
Day five of a road trip in New Mexico and we were still excited about talking about data.
What did you do during your internship at NASA?
We used satellite and flight observations to understand how methane was changing in our local and our regional environment and how we could use data and some of the cool machine learning techniques we learned about in class to understand where methane hotspots were and where methane leaks were happening. There's no way a regulator can drive through every single street, but we can use big scale data analysis and data collection to understand where these changes are happening and create better regulations and better policies or just act on them to stop the spread of methane. Methane is a hundred times worse than carbon dioxide in terms of global warming potential.
I think the coolest part is explaining to regulators and to government agencies and to citizens how we are using our data. You need an understanding of the world around you and the science that governs these things to understand what factors you can take out in which factors are probably going to be important. And I think that the classes I've taken at Berkeley have given me the understanding of the world around me as well as the tools to solve the problems that I realized in the world.
What was your experience with studying ethics?
The class Engineering, the Environment, and Society (E157AC). The class was an exploration of engineering, the environment, and society and how we as engineers come in with the idea that we're going to solve problems for communities, but in many cases (and in most cases that we read in that class), we actually ended up messing up the world in ways worse than it already was. We worked on creating frameworks and ideas and brainstorming methods and community ideas that we could use to not create failed engineering projects. And then as part of the class you get in a group and work on a project all semester. And by the end of it, we realized that we had once again created a failed engineering project despite working so hard to create a framework where we didn't do that. The failure was partially in the project that we created, partially in the way that we presented the project to our community partners, and partially in the way that our group dynamics worked. We read a lot about gender equality and misogyny. And then we had a group of five people in which no one was the designated leader, but yet the one white man was repeatedly referred to as the leader and the four women in the group were referred to as the subordinates. It's not something you can just take a single class on and learn right away.
What are you doing after you graduate?
I am going to be taking a gap year to take a breather from school and I will then be going to Columbia University for a PhD in earth and environmental science, where I will be using big data technologies and satellites to understand ground level atmospheric issues and how they tie into environmental justice. The classes I've taken at Berkeley will continue to be my toolset for my PhD at Columbia and beyond. And I hope to use what I learn in the PhD and in all of my experiences to apply science to policymaking and towards creating better environmental justice.
It's important for me to spend time connecting with the community members and the family members and the folks who are actually living through environmental injustice, and understanding who it is that I work for and what is it that I'm actually trying to solve.
What will you do in your gap year?
I think one thing I've learned with working with satellite data is, you know, you're always looking from top down. You will very rarely talk to the people who are actually going through these issues. And growing up in New Delhi, I lived through that air pollution and my family lives through it. It's everyday conversation. But living in a place like Fremont, I live in very clean air and it doesn't affect me in the same ways that it affects people whose conditions I can see on a map but I don't experience. And so I think it's important for me to spend time connecting with the community members and the family members and the folks who are actually living through environmental injustice, and understanding who it is that I work for and what is it that I'm actually trying to solve.