Student Spotlight- Shivam Gandhi
Shivam Gandhi is a current second year in the EPM program, with his courses focusing on air quality, community development, and the interface between science and policy. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from CSU Stanislaus, and a Master’s in Chemistry from Virginia Tech. Since Fall 2024, he has been an intern at Sacramento Breathe in the Food Scraps & Recycling program, focusing on implementation of SB 1383. As well, he is also a graduate student researcher with Dr. Clare Cannon’s lab working on the Community Air Monitoring Project (CAMP) to empower disadvantaged communities with air monitoring data. He hopes to use these professional experiences and educational background to work in the air quality field to develop regulations and policy that aim to positively impact disadvantaged communities throughout California.
Can you tell us about the work that you do with Sacramento Breathe?
At Sacramento Breathe I operate as an intern with their Food Scraps & Recycling program. What that entails is reaching out to and supporting schools in the northern California area with their implementation of law SB 1383. This law mandates big food generators, like cafeterias at schools, to sort their food waste separate from their normal landfill waste to help lower our methane emissions from landfills. This work involves going to these schools and launching our program, where we educate students on how to appropriately do their part in this process. Besides community engagement, I also spend time working on social media for Breathe, developing informative educational materials for the schools to use, and working on technical documents to help Breathe’s mission for clean air through northern California.
What class has been the most impactful in your time at Davis and why?
I absolutely loved CRD 240 during the fall of my second year! It goes into the theory behind community development. As I have a more technical background and perspective into helping communities with clean air, this class helped support gaps I had in understanding what goes into community development, and the key theories necessary to approach community development.
What are you most excited about for the rest of your time in EPM?
I’ve recently started a GSR position in the Dr. Clare Cannon lab! This is an air quality project that combines my interests in air quality analysis and community engagement, as we work with disadvantaged communities that face environmental injustice through air monitoring. We are able to then take the results of our air monitoring to help empower the community to pursue policy advocacy or other relevant changes. I’m super excited to dive deeper into this project that operates in the field of science, community engagement, and policy!
What were you most excited about when you first arrived on campus?
When I first arrived on campus, I was super excited to get to learn more about operating at the intersection of science and policy. I have a very technical, natural science background in chemistry so I was super excited to learn more about public policy, community engagement, and environmental justice. During my time here, I’ve had as many opportunities as I could want to take coursework that refines my skills in policy evaluation, regional community development, and environmental justice. As well, I’ve been able to leverage my status as a UC Davis EPM grad student to open up many opportunities in the real world to refine these skills, like my internship with SacBreathe and GSR in the Cannon lab!
If you could give future students a piece of advice, what would it be?
My biggest piece of advice is that there is far more to EPM than just what we do in the classroom. Use every resource UC Davis and EPM has to offer to explore the real world and test your limits, but keep your work-life in balance. The classes here are taught by top notch professors and professionals, but more importantly they are taught by incredible humans who are so happy to connect you to other professionals or researchers in their fields of work. I’ve used these relationships to be a TA, intern, student researcher and even EPM Diversity committee treasurer (sometimes all at the same time). It can be overwhelming at times, but this is the perfect place to learn your limits as an individual and to gain as much experience as possible. Just be sure to balance this work life with your personal life, I absolutely couldn’t do any of this without the support of my partner and my dog at home. My days may be quite long at times when managing class with these external responsibilities, but when I’m home I separate the work life from personal life to truly refresh and stay motivated.