Helen Hagos Selected for Dow Sustainability Fellowship

CSE Master’s student Helen Hagos has been selected as a Dow Sustainability Fellow. As such, she will join a growing collaborative community of scholars focused on interdisciplinary approaches to a broad array of sustainability challenges related to water, energy, transportation, built environment, climate change, food, health, human behavior, and others.

Helen works with Prof. Valeria Bertacco in the area of computer architecture and has a specific interest in the efficient design of the hardware and software components of embedded systems to be deployed in ecofriendly applications.

Helen became interested in sustainability when she observed the lack of an organized waste disposal system during her high school years in Ethiopia, where she learned that trash was often dumped near rivers and in forests, and that adequate coordination for trash management and recycling does not exist. As a consequence, she hopes to develop a project to create a trash management infrastructure for major Ethiopian cities through the use of mobile software applications and bar code scanning in order to classify trash for disposal or recycling and to provide an organizational scheme to support the separate collection management at no cost, or almost no additional cost, to the city. Helen hopes that by working with an interdisciplinary team in the Dow Fellows Program, the policy, resource, and cultural issues related to such an undertaking could be addressed.

Helen received her BSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Addis Ababa Institute of Technology in Ethiopia. She received a Female Graduate Scholarship Award to began her MSc coursework there. She came to Michigan in September 2014 to complete her Master’s degree.

About the Dow Sustainability Fellows Program:

Established through a six-year gift from The Dow Chemical Company, the Dow Sustainability Fellows program supports full-time U-M graduate students and postdoctoral scholars who are committed to finding interdisciplinary, actionable, and meaningful sustainability solutions on local-to-global scales.