Looking forward to being a part of the solution!
Hi everyone! My name is Sutyajeet “Sut” Soneja and I am from Washington, D.C. I am really excited to be a part of UNLEASH and am looking forward to meeting so many passionate and engaging people! The areas around the Sustainable Development Goals that I am extremely passionate about are related to developing sustainable interventions and programs that are focused upon the improvement of health outcomes and the mitigation of climate change, simultaneously. My experiences have taught me the importance of being able to collaborate across disciplines and engage at the community level, and through UNLEASH I am looking to establish multi-sector collaborations and new initiatives to push forward to accelerate the areas that I am passionate about, such as health and energy, while also exploring new avenues for me to expand into.
Just a little on my background and what I hope to bring to UNLEASH — I completed my Ph.D. in Environmental Health Sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in August 2014. For my dissertation project, I conducted interdisciplinary, field-based research in rural Nepal, advancing the scientific literature on the impact that cookstoves utilizing solid fuels (i.e., wood, dried animal manure, crop residue, charcoal) have on climate change in South Asia. In case you aren’t familiar with the topic, much of the world’s population relies on cooking with solid fuels, which has major health implications such as resulting in 4 million premature deaths annually and a wide array of other negative health outcomes (e.g., acute lower respiratory infections). Furthermore, cooking with these fuels also impact climate change, such as affecting the meteorological cycle in South Asia (e.g., changing frequency, duration, intensity of the annual monsoons) and contributing towards accelerated melting of glaciers in the Himalayas, which are the largest source of ice and snow mass outside the North and South Pole. That said, my research was geared towards better understanding emissions generated from cooking with these fuels in an effort to further inform climate change mitigation policy in South Asia. Check out a blog article that I recently wrote about it!
From September 2014 to August 2016, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park in Maryland, USA. As a Postdoctoral Fellow, I worked on projects (funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) in partnership with academic and state institutions to lead the analysis of large datasets assessing the association between extreme climatic events that are projected to increase in frequency and intensity and the incidence of waterborne and chronic illnesses. In addition to publishing several papers, I also contributed towards a technical report summarizing all of our work. This work is part of a larger policy framework informing climate adaptation and mitigation strategies locally within the U.S. Concurrent to this fellowship, I also served as a consultant to the U.N. Foundation, where I assisted with conducting a baseline assessment for safe access to energy resources for displaced populations in Rwanda that is geared towards providing direct guidance for future policy interventions.
As I progress in my career, I seek to influence policy through the lens of science. Recognizing that I wanted to continue my work around global health but also needed to increase my understanding of how policy can be influenced, in September 2016 I entered into a two-year Science & Technology Policy Fellowship via the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which is the wrold’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society. Through this fellowship, I am serving as a Senior Impact Assessment Advisor within the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), where I am working to evaluate the efficacy of programs related to disease surveillance in West Africa as part of the post Ebola response. Last but not least, on a more personal note, I love to travel (lifelong goal of visiting all 7 continents with only 1 left to go!), playing sports, meeting new people, and am excited about the potential that this experience possesses to engage so many people from amazing backgrounds!
In summary, I have conducted interdisciplinary research projects in low-resource settings and have high proficiency and years of experience spanning the fields of engineering, environmental health, epidemiology, air pollution, international field research, risk assessment, and translating science into policy. I have also published numerous academic articles and presented to a wide-array of audiences in various settings including international conferences. Bottom line, looking forward to being a part of the solution!
Follow me on twitter at @salutingindian!
