Mélanie was born in Illinois, however has spent her entire life as an expat. She has lived in Germany, Russia, England and she is currently residing in the Netherlands for her bachelor’s degree. She has four nationalities, thanks to her international parents, including Canadian, American, Swiss and Dutch. This multicultural upbringing has provided her with a passion for travel and a very international outlook on the world. This drove her interest in engineering solutions for sustainable development around the world.
At In the University summer of Twente2017, Mélanie is working as an Undergraduate Assistant for led a team of ATLAS students through a project to make the transport system in the city of Curitiba in 3D printing Brazil more sustainable. She applied her design thinking knowledge from the UIF training to this project, and electronics, the team ended up travelling to Brazil over the summer to complete the research. This research included interviewing stakeholders such as well government officials and organisations such asVolvo, mapping the infrastructure and stakeholder interactions, and finally hosting a teaching assistant for stakeholder meeting so that they could exchange opinions and determine solutions to make Curitiba's transport more sustainable. This project helped Mélanie leapfrog into the field of smart cities and sustainable development, as she later completed projects on dometic biogas implementation in Indonesia and reducing air pollution in the Randstaad region of the Netherlands. For Mélanie's final year of her bachelor's she will follow civil and environmental engineering courses during her study abroad at the University of Michigan, and then she will complete her bachelor's thesis as a visitng student-led English second language coursein MIT's Senseable City Lab.
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