 Hello, I'm Nate Mosier, Department Head in Agricultural and Biological Engineering, and it's my great pleasure to introduce our next speaker for this afternoon it is now. Shweta Singh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering with a joint appointment in Environmental and Ecological Engineering here at Purdue University. Dr. Singh received a BTEC in Chemical Engineering from IITBHU in Varanasi, India, and a Master's in Applied Statistics and a PhD in Chemical Engineering both from the Ohio State University just next door in Ohio. From 2012 to 2013 she was a National Research Council postdoc in residence in the Western Ecology Division of the US EPA and 2013 to 2014 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto in Canada before joining us here at Purdue University. Dr. Singh's research focuses on advancing systems methodologies and computational tools for studying how manufacturing systems and energy systems interact with one another and how new technologies change them and can enable more renewable decarbonization better for the environment more sustainable manufacturing. Her research has been supported by funding from several federal, private, and non-profit organizations including the National Science Foundation, the US Army Research Lab, and the International Renewable Energy Agency. She was one of 83 early career engineers that were invited by the National Academy of Engineers to attend the US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium in 2021 and she was awarded the AICHE Environmental Division Early Career Award and also in 2021 and a Young Achiever Award from her alma mater IIT BHU in 2021. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Shweta Singh. Can you all hear me well? Yeah. Thank you so much everyone for coming and thank you Nate for that introduction and thank you Marsha and everyone for organizing this event. It's wonderful to be sharing some of my journey and when I was making this talk it was I think one of the most challenging talks I have ever made because it was a lot of reflections and a lot of trying to connect the dots. When the path is not very linear it becomes much challenging but I think it's also fun. So I would like to begin by thanking my mom and dad especially my mom. My mom never graduated from high school so it's dedicated to all the first generation students and faculty here but their excitement and enthusiasm for supporting my education when women education was still not very prevalent in the part of the country I grew up is really instrumental in me being standing here today. So of course I wish they were here but my dad has never come to US and I don't think he will come so that's fine. So going back since I grew up in a household where there was not a lot of scientists and I didn't have exposure what was happening in the country and in media was truly instrumental in informing me what I wanted to do and one of that was basically a Chippko movement which is one of the earliest conservation forest conservation movement that was there in India and you can see these tribal women literally hugging the tree I think that's where the term tree huggers have come but it was truly that the deforestation was affecting the livelihood of these women and at that I got inspired and as a kid that's what you do so I wrote a poem and I wrote a poem about saving the environment that got published in the annual magazine when I was in grade seventh and that was really something that was oh maybe this is what I would want to do maybe write poetry to save environment and I grew up in this town which is Varanasi it's one of the unique thing is that it's one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the world so talking about sustainable cities there's a lot to learn from this city but this very chaotic as well this looks pretty but when you look closely there's a lot of plastic debris and we all are aware about the plastic waste so growing up I participated in a lot of community events growing going out with the school team and actually cleaning the debris out of the city's rivers so that it does not reach the sea of course we failed tremendously this was in 1990s and we still have that issue so I thought that okay this is something maybe I'll do for a week maybe I'll just help clean the cities out of the waste but then I had a event where I visited a friend's house and I watched this movie this is a 1966 movie it's called Fantastic Witch and it's a fantastic movie because it shows a journey through human body in a very small submarine where the scientists are shrunk and there was one woman scientist so I was very inspired that maybe I will travel in submarine someday and so I got fascinated with human body understanding brain started studying about Alzheimer's disease and lot more and thought maybe I'll become a doctor I had no idea of course I was also fascinated with submarines I did not know what to do to basically drive a submarine so then I graduate high school and the career choices come in front of me which was engineering and medicine and of course my parents wanted to be a doctor like a real doctor which I never became and I don't think I can become but there was this statistics that there were more women in medicine at that time in India for some reason and not more in medicine sorry in engineering and my parents of course wanted me to go for the better path of medicine and I being a true teenager I rebelled and I was like I am going to go to engineering they relented I got lucky I graduated I basically cleared the exam to go to one of the IITs and the fortunate thing was that this was in my city so my parents had like no more restrictions for me to become an engineer and so I became an engineer of course this was not all I had no idea what engineers do tells now I was like okay I'm going to become an engineer and then there were choices and the choices were all of this in front of me and someone said that girls don't study mechanical engineer so I became a chemical engineer and of course in my batch there were six girls in chemical engineering and only one girl in mechanical engineer so I was very happy okay I made a better choice but then of course we know that's not true but from here my life completely changed once I entered undergraduate and of course being in IITs which is one of the top institutes I got exposed to lot more things that I was at my hometown sorry in my household environment so the first thing I did was I started researching I actually went into the library stacks and back in those days I had to climb up the ladder on the in the library to actually pull out journal stacks and the first review paper that I did was on the biomass waste to energy and I'm so surprised to see that today it's still it's a very very relevant technology and research question and this was completely a self-study but then I started pestering some of my professors and I asked them to give me project and the second project that I got was on modeling biological oxygen demand along the river Ganges so understanding how we are really ruining the marine ecosystems or freshwater ecosystem that was in my junior year and then I got very fortunate there were two friend students who were visiting my institute and my I was there in the summer I had nothing to do my professor was like can you show them around the city I said well yes I also want to join them in the lab and I joined them in the lab and with these two friend students we started exploring photocatalysts for clean energy and we were basically synthesizing platinum loaded cadmium sulphide for breaking down water into hydrogen clean hydrogen so learnt a lot about XRD, SEM, TEM on all the strong analytical techniques and that's when I was like this is what I want to do for life chemical engineering and so my undergraduate research experience which was kind of not a very linear well thought out plan gave me an idea of going into chemical engineering but then of course life is not always as we plan so there were no jobs in chemical engineering I did interview a couple of Indian companies Indian oil and HLL that we call and didn't get the job I became very ambitious and applied directly to the Netherlands office of Shell and of course did not get the job I did get a one or couple of round of interview which was surprising but so I settled in for a software developer job so that's where I learned a lot about software engineering and Java and then we were doing a project for content management and content deployment to a new portal and my role was to really design the portal and connect with the back end so this was completely new for me of course I was not happy but I still learned and I think in retrospect that was a very interesting detour because it gave me a systems perspective about how different things connect together when you want to achieve a goal and still after this I knew that I wanted to do chemical engineering and that was not possible for me to do in India so I applied and US was my first choice and I got accepted into Ohio State University where my statement of purpose was all about catalyst synthesis I wanted to develop new materials but then I met my future advisor Dr. Bakshi who was doing this macro scale research who were connecting process systems engineering to ecosystems and macroeconomics statistics and I completely jumped the ship it was again an unknown territory but it was so fascinating and so much going back to my love of saving environment that I was like this is what maybe I want to pursue and then of course rest is history because this was a very upcoming field and then I went on to do a post-doc with the western ecology division working on biogeochemical cycles and later on changed the field into going to University of Toronto where I worked on urban systems science. So this is what has kind of a syringe-deprecious journey to sustainability science and engineering so what I do today is we actually develop theories and models to design our manufacturing systems to work within the limits of ecosystems so we of course want to meet all the demands and all the goals of next generation manufacturing but without damaging our ecosystem so when we think about this economic subsystem where all our manufacturing system is it's kind of a black box we really don't understand the connections across national region or global so what we focus on is actually opening this black box and mapping all the interconnections so if we want to design that macro scale system we really want to understand what's happening inside that system so some of the analogy that I gave is kind of human genome mapping unless we mapped the whole genome we cannot edit a specific genome to really understand the interaction so it's kind of a complex networks and that's what drives our whole manufacturing systems today so in a sense it's a macroscopic complex systems challenge as engineers we are adept at studying individual nodes we design technology at the individual nodes but if you really want to design our sustainable manufacturing systems we want them to understand all the interconnections so that we can know where the trajectory is going in future and that's what the field of industrial ecology do it basically looks at industrial networks as industrial ecosystem and maybe hopefully in future can design it at that macro scale but it's a really difficult challenge because we are talking about maybe thousands of different kinds of technologies interacting and really thinking about that design so in my lab what we do is we design these multi-scale modeling methods and computational methods for industrial ecology and I'll highlight the three specific aspects or thrust one is the physical mapping another is the economic mapping and then the dynamics understanding so for physical mapping this is mostly just network mapping of how different industries are interacting with each other it's a very tedious task and it's very slow so most of the so far the status quo had been empirical mapping but what we have done in our lab is develop this algorithm that where if we have mechanistic models for different industries and we put it in our algorithm it automatically generates the network map and the idea is that with this automatic generation we also have a quantification of emissions and waste generation in the network some of the application is in supply chain redesign so if we have a new technology we want to introduce at a different scale we introduce the model and we can see how the network will change and we can do that iteratively to really come to an optimal design so that we are overall at the macro scale reducing the emissions but also creating a zero waste system so that's one of the first thing that we did and we have a cloud based automation tool for it which is under right now a lot of development but we really thank the National Science Foundation to support this work. The next thrust that we have done is we have developed what we call as US industrial ecology virtual lab and this is again a larger scale network optimization kind of approach where we can study how the industry in one region let's say Illinois is interacting with California and we can study the cascading impact or supply chain impact of disruptions and changes in different region so it's a large matrix model there for us it will be about 52,000 by 52,000 kind of model but this is in collaboration with University of Sydney Professor Manfred Lenzon and this is a really powerful economic lab that we have right now which is very unique to our group and we are using it for studying the impact of transitioning to decarbonization system or even circular economy in the future. The last thing is about network dynamics so since now we have an approach to do the static mapping of physical network and economic network now we understand want to understand the dynamics and with the advent of data we are taking use of machine learning kind of model using mechanistic dynamic model and then creating surrogate dynamical model using machine learning and then kind of putting all of that together to understand the overall dynamics of the network. So where are we going next so now we have three thrusts static mapping physical network economic and dynamics next is basically it's a good time to actually look into the future of sustainable manufacturing and taking more of an convergent approach. So one key project we are working right now is on sustainable energetics manufacturing which is in collaboration with Professor Baldwin Professor Hartman and Professor Sutherland and here we are thinking of optimizing the process value chain for reshoring lot of the defense manufacturing within the US. The next is of course pharmaceutical circular supply chains with very eminent team Professor Reclitus is here and it's kind of taking a convergent approach of using cyber infrastructure and ecological thinking to redesign our bio manufacturing supply chain in the US and also really thinking about advancing education because next generation manufacturing will require retraining and re-skill development of the way designing has been done. And really an exciting time for advancing the foundations of sustainable manufacturing especially after we have seen the supply chain disruptions in the COVID times and also thinking about more regional versus local and global kind of manufacturing. So yeah next four or five years I think with the tools that we have developed right now in our lab we have lot of wonderful application in bio economy, let's say plastic manufacturing, energetics manufacturing so I think right now we do have a lot more to explore that I'm really looking forward. With that I would be summarizing and I'm really grateful for the journey lot of it was unplanned but I'm so glad to be here sometimes I feel like Alice in Wonderland that I didn't really know what I was getting into but I'm so excited that I'm here. I especially would like to thank my PhD advisor who is kind of a pioneer in sustainable chemical engineering he started working at in 25 years ago when people were not even talking about it so I was fascinated with the line of thought and Professor Chris Kennedy of course he's a pioneer in urban metabolism so really looking at cities as living organism and how can we design it to be more sustainable. Dr. Janna Compton who is an ecologist with whom I learned a lot about bio sorry biogeochemistry. All my students of course without their hard work some of my students are here so thank you so much for joining and I have excellent students Will Farlassos who just won the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and he is an exciting line of research he's actually trained as a robotics engineer so I'm so glad that he's jumping the ship and also a lot of my undergraduate one of them Isha Surai is here who is going to do her PhD at Northwestern in chemical engineering so congratulations and of course a lot of mentors and inspirations I would like to thank Professor Mosier Professor Engel could not be here our ABE department heads and Professor Sutherland especially for the support of my interdisciplinary research which was very different than a traditional engineer and my mentors in ABE and Tripoli and Professor Radish who is here thank you so much because I do want to quote I was training for half marathon that's what I do when I'm just frustrated with proposal rejection but but Professor Radish is really fast so he would finish his 10 mile and then he'll come back and then he'll go come get me so yeah it was really a true gesture of telling me that how supported I feel in ABE and at Purdue Professor Rakesh Agrawal I think from him I learned a lot about questioning everything so I remember having a discussion about non-linear thermodynamics and he said that just because a Nobel Prize winner said that don't just believe it question it so I was like really that helped me think about science really well and Professor Rakelitis thank you for all the support because we were submitting the proposal it was getting declined and then he mentioned that well be ambitious keep trying you may try even for the 13th time but just keep trying so thank you for helping me keeping going Professor Greg Shaver he is here and Professor Michel Mouzon they are my CRN mentors coaching resource network and that has been truly instrumental in my success so I really appreciate that support support and Professor Monika Ivanshtinova we lost her and I still remember she was a force of inspiration dedication and the leadership I was just like when I came to ABE I was like oh I'm so glad to be here to have these kind of leadership so with that thank you and I'll be happy to take questions okay we're working so I'm John Sutherland I'm head of environmental ecological engineering so we have a few questions for Professor Singh well congratulations also on your early career research award that you just got from Purdue um okay so your education is all in chemical engineering but your ABE and jointly appointed and triply so that's actually jointly appointed across two colleges was that the plan when you came to Purdue or did that also just develop and how does that facilitate your research uh you know I think a lot of it was not planned but since I enjoyed doing research in both areas I think it's uh it's really good for me to see both ends of the world like how natural systems engineering happened like a lot of ABE faculty look at the water systems and the grain systems and all of that and from an engineering perspective like really looking at manufacturing and chemical engineering and processing so I think being in two colleges has been truly helpful for me to really expand and see and also for my students I think a lot of time the engineering training becomes in a silo and that has to go away when we are thinking about sustainability and sustainable manufacturing because truly we are thinking about we are dealing with issues like climate change and ecosystems collapse which has a long-term impact and engineers have a very significant role to play so for me it's uh it happened naturally it happened not by plan I applied to Purdue Tripoli opening but of course there was a joint appointment opportunity and um yeah I can say it's just I would say it's sometimes it gets a little bit stretched because I don't understand what ag machinery people do but that's okay yeah this is Vilas faculty of chemical engineering uh the question is you were saying there were there were no jobs in chemical engineering is it true yet or no I think it has changed a lot but back then there were a couple of jobs and they were really I mean I hate to say that but they're they're truly not open to women engineers I mean I had that question early on that would you be comfortable working in a plant setting just like of course I'm here for the job but didn't get it yeah first off of sweet I really thank you for sharing this beautiful beautiful story about your personal journey I think it's very powerful it's remarkable and inspiring as the first generation of you know immigrants of female students and so on so forth and what I'm really appreciated you share some of your failure story right has been rejected for application for company and so that really showed the true persistence and grades what we really cherish at Purdue and thank you for doing that um I guess the one thing I really want to learn is you know I have been seeing you you were saying you know the success is not linear yes it's not linear but in your case exponential I think it's growing very rapidly right because you're connecting the dots from all the directions the one thing personally and also I think from college we're very interested in understanding the landscape of sustainable manufacture clearly you're one of the pioneers and leaders in that area can you talk a little bit about you know where Purdue is in the you know the national landscape of the research area and what we're lacking and how can we you know emphasize or enhance that area maybe John you you're interesting that thank you professor Lu for the question and thank you for your comment I think Purdue is a great place for sustainable manufacturing because of course semiconductor is something that has been talked a lot but it's also pharmaceutical manufacturing so we just got a big uh grant on working with that so we have a very unique facility with that is led by professor reclitus professor Nagy so we have a lot of opportunities there semiconductor of course we also I also think the bioeconomy so we have great leaders in biological manufacturing that also involves biologics and all of that other than I think even in automotive sector we have great opportunities so I feel that this is the right place for starting the sustainable manufacturing next-gen manufacturing in a lot of those things in terms of also I think I want to comment on the cyberspace because a lot of iot's and stuff so cyber manufacturing is something that's where Purdue definitely has a opportunity to grow in that area a lot more I think where we are currently lacking a little bit is this push on the ecological connections I think that's where a lot of European universities are really taking the lead and I think that's where we'll have a lot of things to really talk about because we do have a great college of agriculture and college of science so that collaboration can become much stronger in for really enhancing sustainable manufacturing that was pretty good yeah that was good we have time for a couple more I don't comment a lot I just support staff here but I'm hearing all three of these talks I'm kind of connected some dots on maybe a article I need to write I'm trying to polish my writing but there seems to be a big disconnect with the hard work researchers do to make machines like diesel engines cleaner you know environmental things and I've actually engaged I can't remember the retired state senator excuse me one of our senators he's retired he was back in the Obama administration I ride bicycle out in the country I've had particulates from the diesel trucks rolled on me numerous times and I've I've asked police officers why the emissions that are removed from these things so easily and you know I know this isn't quite your area but how can we connect the dots from or we've we've got federal rules you guys have made great progress but yet at the enforcement level at the state level it seems to be ignored I've had a police officer say they don't enforce federal what do you call it admissions policy um I've had other people say they don't even know what I'm talking about it must be a broken down truck but anyone anyway that's my point I'm wanting to help somehow yeah I'm afraid I don't have the right answer but I think I do see there is a lot of scope for citizen science so there is a lot of gap between bought environmental researchers and academicians have done and what gets out there in hands of citizens and the way and another thing is making it more easier to adopt these policies would be something that we can do so that's a lot of research gap I would say that exists in terms of translation it seems to make us think yeah I think the intent was conservation but then I think that got really badly put in the light that all these tree huggers they are not they're against development or anything but if you go back to the history of that movement it was actually about livelihoods local livelihoods so the disconnect between local impact versus what is happening in the global I think that multi-scale connection needs to be made before we can take that in context thanks you had a very nice talk I had a question on your sustainability and your analysis of the pharmaceutical supply chain I don't think anyone recognizes but what's the impact on delivering different types of medicines to parts of the world that no longer or do not have access to them yet yeah I think yeah it will be a huge impact I have not I think Dr. Carrie Klase can definitely speak more to it but that part is dear and I also think that the impact on environment is also huge because of the waste medicines and the way it is damaging ecosystems and how can we bring it back into the supply chain and recycling and remanufacturing in lots of remote parts where there's no access of medicine I think I would definitely see that when you get back the work hours from people when they are not that sick and they can actually enjoy the quality of life that's a huge impact the improvement in quality of life is exponential if we can do that especially with the distributed kind of manufacturing or modular that is a like this is doing maybe one more what time are we supposed to okay till we're done okay I think there's one at the back hi so my name is Isha I'm one of her undergrads she's honestly truly been inspiration for my like undergraduate research and kind of what I want to pursue in grad school as well so I wanted to ask you based off your presentation it seems like you've been pretty ambitious about being driven by your curiosity you know whenever an opportunity comes up you kind of take it so I guess my question is has there ever been anything that you wish maybe you had spent more like time on or some not really regret but something that maybe you hope to spend time on in the future maybe something that you didn't get to explore that you know maybe a road that you didn't take because something else was in front of you is there anything that maybe you're hoping to to study or look into yeah for sure I think if I look back into my undergrad selection scientific computation was something I left but it has such a huge impact on research and the way we are doing data science data-driven research that I would definitely want to learn more about scientific computation and how at the back end things are working so maybe I'll take a sabbatical and do that I don't know yeah all right let's thank professor sing one last time