Woodruff School Student Devasena Sitaram is a 2023 Millennium Fellow
December 1, 2023
By Mar Perez
Devasena Sitaram, a third-year undergraduate student in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, is one of 22 Georgia Tech students selected for the 2023 Millennium Fellowship, a joint leadership program of the Millennium Campus Network (MCN) and the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI).
Sitaram was chosen among a record-breaking 44,000 applicants from over 3,000 campuses across 170 nations for her dedication to driving change and making the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and UNAI Principles a reality in her local community.
Millennium Fellows participate in a semester-long leadership development program to improve their student organizing, partnership building, and community impact skills.
Sitaram is heavily involved in Engineers without Borders (EWB) and serves as the project lead for the Malawi Project, where she is helping implement latrines to improve sanitation infrastructure at a rural school in Mpitilira, Malawi.
"It has been a great experience in humanitarian engineering as we work with contractors, NGOs, and the community to provide a solution that fits the community's needs and is sustainable," Sitaram said.
Sitaram's Millennium Fellowship project is related to EWB. Part of her project is to continue to implement the latrines in Malawi, and the other part is to spread humanitarian engineering to the wider Georgia Tech community.
"I am planning and organizing a workshop where different people can learn about global development and contribute in a small way to our projects to get a taste of work in this field," she said.
Sitaram is also minoring in robotics and is involved in research with the Exoskeleton and Prosthetic Intelligent Controls (EPIC) Lab. She is working with a team to create a start-up focused on gamifying citizen science.
This year, over 4,000 Millennium Fellows on 260 campuses in 38 nations are participating in the program and the Class of 2023 is on track to engage in projects collectively advancing all 17 SDGs and all 10 UNAI Principles.