Mei-Li Hey
Fellowship awarded: 2023
Mei-Li Hey, MEng, is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. Advised by Dr. Carsten Prasse, she is in the Environmental Sustainability, Resilience, and Health track. She earned a master of engineering degree from the University of California, Los Angeles and has spent the past six years in the aerospace sector working as a Mechanical Design Engineer on the James Webb Space Telescope. In 2020, she founded Atwero, a nonprofit that stemmed from research on access to improved sanitation facilities in Sub-Saharan Africa conducted while earning her undergraduate degree. Atwero designs and manufactures pit latrine assistive devices for persons with disabilities and operates out of Uganda. Through her work for Atwero, she developed a passion for improving environmental health and health equity, noticing overlap between the sanitation sector and food systems, an intersection that she intends to explore further with her research.