hi! i'm sarah.
I have traversed trails across research, industry, government service, and volunteerism. Finally, I feel I have arrived at a point in my career that reflects my values and interests: inspiring ethics in engineering, enabling others to improve our world, and making diverse forms of knowledge more accessible. As a Ph.D. candidate in Water Resources Engineering at Penn State, I have been fortunate to be awarded the resources to enable me to design and implement my own dissertation proposal in a place that is very special to me, Paraguay.
I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Paraguay, developing a deep appreciation for building meaningful relationships as a gateway to development. Through these relationships, I conducted diagnostics with community members to measure how they envisioned their future. After having the privilege to listen to the challenges that the community faced, it was apparent that life was not always so easy for rural Paraguayan families.
Expanses of monoculture soy and wheat fields owned by only 1% of the Paraguayan population were encroaching on the community and nearby forest reserve. Neighbors spoke of the changes in climate, food availability, water quality, and the presence of springs and streams. Running water would only reach the end of the community for less than 1/3 of the week. They also mentioned challenges from newfound dependence on electricity unreliably supplied to homes. The necessity of money to sustain livelihoods during modern development forced younger generations to migrate to Argentina and urban areas in search of better opportunities. My role was apparent: to find resources that enable the community to value their land while protecting livelihoods without it being at the expense of environmental degradation.
I connected community leaders with organizations and a forestry institute and accompanied them in initiatives to improve the economic value of deteriorated plots of land. I extended my stay to work with environmental and agricultural engineers at the World Wildlife Fund. I saw that modern-day engineering needs to be coupled with education, tangible conservation, and viable economic gains. I also recognized the importance of strategic partnerships between the US and regions with context-dependent development objectives to improve capabilities for sustainable resource extraction and land management.
My observations provoked a growing number of questions regarding land use, infrastructure, sustainability, and equity. Coupling my experiences with formal academic processes continues to pose an ongoing challenge as I aspire to be an independent global scholar measuring success through tangible impacts. My short-term goals include pursuing doctoral research that provides ample opportunities for me to grow into a geospatial and systems-focused engineer, refining skills in data analysis, visualization, and science communication skills. In the long term, I'd like to pursue a career in academia or institutional research laboratory to strengthen international collaboration and advance knowledge in the areas of natural resource management and landscape design and development.
