Page 16 - CEGE Magazine Fall 2022
P. 16

Cleaning Up Waste AND Supporting Gender Equity
  STUDENTPROFILE
PHOEBE EDALATPOUR
 Phoebe Edalatpour, a student medical engineering major, determined daily needs of a specific community. It
in the Master’s Sustainable Development Program, won the 2022 Acara Challenge for her project to transform
waste and catalyze gender equity in Sierra Leone. She developed a plan
to bring plastics recycling to remote villages of Sierra Leone, where she once worked as a Peace Corps volunteer.
Phoebe inherited her name from her grandmother, and her spirit for service
is rooted in a long-held family value. Her parents emphasized that not everyone had the opportunities that she did and involved her early in service to neighbors in her hometown of Philadelphia. When Edalatpour graduated from high school, she enrolled at Georgia Tech as a
16 CEGE | CSE.UMN.EDU/CEGE
to make her contribution to the world.
In her first year of college, she traveled overseas for the first time with Engineers Without Borders. Her destination was Cameroon. She went abroad three more times as an undergraduate—once to South Africa and twice to Ghana.
Those two trips to Ghana changed Edalatpour’s view on engineering.
The project she worked on there was
to build a low-tech, human-centered water delivery system. It needed to be easy to maintain and needed to last for years. The emphasis of that project was service to the community, not technical engineering. This experience led Edalatpour to consider the application of her engineering skills to meet real,
inspired her to switch her major to Civil Engineering.
After earning her bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering, Edalatpour spent a year with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone as a women’s health worker. She noticed then the lack of recycling, the plumes of black smoke that rose from the pits where the waste was burned. She noted, too, that the work of taking the trash to the pit and burning the trash fell to the women, exposing the women to greater health risks.
Edalatpour returned to Georgia and took a job in the construction industry, but she could not shake her desire
to be useful in a more fundamental
  















































































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