On Friday, April 17 (12:00-1:30pm), Professor Anu Ramaswami (Civil Engineering, Princeton University) will deliver a joint GMS/CEE/ISAS distinguished lecture. The lecture will be held in Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall. Co-sponsored with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Institute for South Asian Studies.
No RSVP required.
Abstract
Anu Ramaswami has pioneered a Social-Ecological-Infrastructural Urban Systems (SEIUS) Framework that explores how interactions between human, natural, and engineered provisioning systems – that provide energy, water, transportation, buildings, waste management, food, and green infrastructure – shape human health, environmental impacts (GHG emissions), and social inequality. Over the past 6 years, in her role as Director of Princeton’s M.S. Chadha Center of Global India, her work has focused on applying the SEIUS framework to India, creating a first pan-India dataset characterizing human settlements for 1.4 billion Indians across all 600+ districts of India with diverse social-ecological and urbanization (SEU) features. This body of work models infrastructure baselines and futures across multiple sectors (e.g., energy, mobility, cooling, and cooking) with the goal of informing pathways toward decarbonization, resilience, health, and equity, customized to locally specific data at the district level.
This talk will present examples of these pan-India datasets that represent local SEIUS features with multi-scale alignment of energy demand from local to state to national scales, and their current application to characterize infrastructure, inequality, urban-rural differences, and human health (disease burden) from environment and infrastructure risk factors across diverse cities of India.
About Dr. Anu Ramaswami
Anu Ramaswami is an interdisciplinary environmental engineer and professor at Princeton University, with appointments across India studies, civil and environmental engineering, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. She has pioneered sustainable urban systems science and knowledge co-production for developing low-carbon, healthy, and equitable cities. Her work explores how eight key sectors that provide water, energy, food, buildings, mobility, connectivity, waste management, and green/public spaces shape human and environmental well-being, from local to global scales. Ramaswami’s work integrates environmental science and engineering, industrial ecology, public health, and public affairs, with a human-centered and systems focus. She is the inaugural director of the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India at Princeton University and currently serves as a science expert on the United Nations Environment Programme’s International Resource Panel, and on the editorial advisory board for Nature Sustainability, Environmental Science & Technology, and Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability. She is the recipient of the 2022 American Academy of Environmental Engineers & Scientists (AAEES) Science Award and the 2022 Steven K. Dentel Association of Environmental Engineering & Science Professors (AEESP) Award for Global Outreach.