Himank Sharma has been the Project Lead for Water-to-Cloud, an initiative housed under the Tata Center for Development at UChicago to map water quality across Indian rivers. After completing his Bachelors in Engineers and Masters in Liberal Arts, he has been working at the intersection of social impact and technology. Previously, he was working as a Consulting Engineer with Cisco and later as a Senior Associate with TechnoServe in India and Africa to design and implement interventions to improve farmer livelihood opportunities. Since undergraduation, Himank has pursued street and stage theatre on the side and performed in seven professional plays in association with Theatre for Theatre (TFT). He was also invited to perform at the prestigious Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai. He will now be heading to pursue MBA at Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley.

Priyank Hirani is currently consulting for The Rockefeller Foundation’s Asia Regional Office as the Asia Data & Technology Lead. Most recently, Priyank served as the Program Director for the Water-to-Cloud (W2C) initiative at the Tata Centre for Development at UChicago. A river water quality monitoring project created in partnership with the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME), W2C uses a novel approach involving cyberphysical sensor networks and cloud-enabled data dissemination capabilities with the goal to inspire data-driven decision making and effective policy discussions through availability of such real-time data and visualizations.

Priyank was nominated to attend the first United Nations Youth Climate Summit in New York in 2019 due to his work as an UNLEASH Global Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Talent focused on Clean Water and Sanitation. Earlier, his team’s idea, UNLEAK, won the Gold prize in the business idea pitch competition under WATER theme at UNLEASH 2017 in Denmark. In October 2019 he was an invited speaker to the World Economic Forum’s India Economic Summit representing the Global Shaper Community and co-leading a session on Plastic, Pollution & Pure Water with National Geographic Society Fellow, Dr. Heather Koldeway.

He received his MS in Integrated Circuit Design from Imperial College London in 2013 and Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science. Priyank worked for Mullard Space Science Lab in the UK before returning to India in 2015 to join the Young India Fellowship (YIF). Post this, he supported grassroots level implementation of infrastructure improvement and behavior change strategies working through the entire Fecal Sludge Management value chain as an International Innovation Corps Fellow.