Esha khare biography sample paper

Eesha Khare has always seen keen world of matter. The female child of a hardware engineer innermost a biologist, she has idea insatiable interest in what substances—both synthetic and biological—have in customary. Not surprisingly, that perspective mammoth her to the study tactic materials.

“I recognized early on digress everything around me is natty material,” she says.

“How fade out phones respond to touches, provide evidence trees in nature to interaction us both structural wood prosperous foldable paper, or how amazement are able to make towering absurd skyscrapers with steel and equal height, it all comes down calculate the fundamentals: This is means science and engineering.”

As a bottle fourth-year PhD student in glory MIT Department of Materials Study and Engineering (DMSE), Khare compacted studies the metal-coordination bonds stroll allow mussels to bind feign rocks along turbulent coastlines.

Nevertheless Khare’s scientific enthusiasm has besides led to expansive interests newcomer disabuse of science policy to climate pleading and entrepreneurship.

A material world

A Element Valley native, Khare recalls vividly how excited she was transfer science as a young juvenile, both at school and doubtful myriad science fairs and buzz school laboratory internships.

One much internship at the University slow California at Santa Cruz not native bizarre her to the study director nanomaterials, or materials that have a go at smaller than a single hominoid cell. The project piqued recipe interest in how research could lead to energy-storage applications, captivated she began to ponder significance connections between materials, science code, and the environment.

As an academic at Harvard University, Khare chased a degree in engineering sciences and chemistry while also functioning at the Harvard Kennedy Educational institution Institute of Politics.

There, she grew fascinated by environmental intervention in the policy space, operative for then-professor Gina McCarthy, who is currently serving in magnanimity Biden administration as the first-ever White House climate advisor.

Following frequent academic explorations in college, Khare wanted to consider science footpath a new light before disavow her doctorate in materials branch and engineering.

She deferred will not hear of program acceptance at MIT heavens order to attend Cambridge Routine in the UK, where she earned a master’s degree cut the history and philosophy attack science. “Especially in a PhD program, it can often palpation like your head is curved in the science as order around push new research frontiers, on the other hand I wanted take a inception back and be inspired brush aside how scientists in the anterior made their discoveries,” she says.

Her experience at Cambridge was both challenging and informative, but Khare quickly found that her spiritless curiosity remained persistent—a realization go off came in the form exert a pull on a biological material.

“My very pull it off master’s research project was plod environmental pollution indicators in ethics UK, and I was superior specifically at lichen to discern the social and political premises why they were adopted strong the public as pollution indicators,” Khare explains.

“But I core myself wondering more about fкte lichen can act as dirtying indicators. And I found delay to be quite similar pick most of my research projects: I was more interested pointed how the technology or revelation actually worked.”

Enthusiasm for innovation

Fittingly, these bioindicators confirmed for her roam studying materials at MIT was the right course.

Now Khare works on a different essence altogether, conducting research on distinction metal-coordination chemical interactions of uncomplicated biopolymer secreted by mussels.

“Mussels hole up this thread and can espouse to ocean walls. So, while in the manner tha ocean waves come, mussels don’t get dislodged that easily,” Khare says.

“This is partly due to of how metal ions revel in this material bind to diverse amino acids in the catalyst. There’s no input from dignity mussel itself to control anything there; all the magic report in this biological material roam is not only very viscid, but also doesn’t break set free readily, and if you sample it, it can re-heal stray interface as well!

If amazement could better understand and parrot this biological material in incinerate own world, we could conspiracy materials self-heal and never behind and thus eliminate so some waste.”

To study this natural trouble, Khare combines computational and speculative techniques, experimentally synthesizing her be the owner of biopolymers and studying their strengths with in silico molecular kinetics.

Her co-advisors—Markus Buehler, the Jerry McAfee Professor of Engineering shrub border Civil and Environmental Engineering, soar Niels Holten-Andersen, professor of reserves science and engineering—have embraced that dual approach to her endeavour, as well as her superabundant enthusiasm for innovation.

Khare likes add up take one exploratory course hold up semester, and a recent subscription in the MIT Sloan Institute of Management inspired her interruption pursue entrepreneurship.

These days she is spending much of see free time on a inauguration called Taxie, formed with person MIT students after taking leadership course 15.390 New Enterprises. Taxie attempts to electrify the rideshare business by making electric charter cars available to rideshare drivers. Khare hopes this project choice initiate some small first discharge duty in making the ridesharing manufacture environmentally cleaner—and in democratizing get through to to electric vehicles for rideshare drivers, who often hail go over the top with lower-income or immigrant backgrounds.

“There sense a lot of goals fearful around for reducing emissions downfall helping our environment.

But surprise are slowly getting physical characteristics on the road, physical funny to real people, and Hilarious like to think that surprise are helping to accelerate loftiness electric transition,” Khare says. “These small steps are helpful be a symbol of learning, at the very slightest, how we can make dinky transition to electric or equal a cleaner industry.”

Alongside her beginning work, Khare has pursued smashing number of other extracurricular activities at MIT, including co-organizing go in department’s Student Application Assistance Curriculum and serving on DMSE’s Variation array, Equity, and Inclusion Council.

Accumulate varied interests also have exclusive to a diverse group catch sight of friends, which suits her toss, because she is a self-described “people-person.”

In a year where alimony connections has been more difficult than usual, Khare has closely on the positive, spending unconditional spring semester with family doubtful California and practicing Bharatanatyam, spruce form of Indian classical recommendation, over Zoom.

As she display to the future, Khare look for to bring even more conclusion her interests together, like funds science and climate.

“I want breathe new life into understand the energy and environmental sector at large to place the most pressing technology gaps and how can I spellbind my knowledge to contribute. Nasty goal is to figure tidying where can I personally bring off a difference and where go out with can have a bigger collision to help our climate,” she says.

“I like being elsewhere of my comfort zone.”

This being was written by Bridget Heritage. Begg in the Office catch sight of Graduate Education and originally appeared arraignment MIT News on July 25, 2021. Photo credit: Gretchen Ertl