"The Grand Challenges focus on some of the core societal problems facing mankind, as determined by the National Academy of Engineering. As a young college student, I was excited to focus on tackling some of these core problems, particularly through entrepreneurship. For my GCSP project, I focused on the theme of Sustainability. I worked on a project building and analyzing various biofuel production processes, covering biodiesel production from Waste Vegetable Oil and Algae, and biogas production from Municipal Solid Waste. It was a great experience and it further fueled my passion to help solve the energy/resource/environment challenge.

Post-graduation, I worked at an oil refinery for Royal Dutch Shell and at a major consulting company in the energy, chemicals, & resources space, Nexant. However, I returned to my sustainability and entrepreneurship roots when I launched my hard technology startup, Determinant Materials. We are tackling the problem of electronic waste and are looking to build modular Microrefineries for the domestic, localized processing of e-waste and the production of secure, traceable, critical materials."