Nicola Ritsch , Visiting Fellow

Nikki is a Ph.D. student and Research Assistant in the Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) where she was recently awarded the Pugh Fellowship. She is currently working as a Fulbright Research Fellow in partnership with the University of Rwanda’s African Center of Excellence on the Internet of Things (ACEIoT) and East Africa’s Regional Centre of Excellence in Biomedical Engineering and E-health (CEBE). She is also a visiting fellow at Kigali Collaborative Research Center(KCRC). Her research interests and career goals are focused on implementing data-driven policies which ensure equitable access to infrastructural services in low-income areas, which also promote sustainable protection of the environment. Specifically, she looks at how infrastructure can be used as a social sensor to help identify marginalized groups who might lack access to services and what role the impacts of climate change have on this process. In Rwanda, she is studying the role that broadband internet plays in enabling the use of wireless devices and the implications this has for macro-level healthcare provision. She also works in rural Alaska studying water systems and she conducts an econometric analysis of broadband systems in the United States. Nikki holds a master’s degree in Civil Systems Engineering and a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering, with a minor in Leadership and a certificate in Engineering for Developing Communities from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She was a Boettcher scholar and graduated as the outstanding graduate of her class. Prior to starting her Ph.D., Nikki worked as a climate change consultant for the World Bank Group, assessing the economic impact of climate change on road projects in Eastern Africa and she helped to establish the Bank’s decarbonization in maritime shipping program, for which the team won a World Bank Group’s Sustainable Development Team Award. She has also worked as a research analyst for Resilient Analytics, a researcher for the monitoring and evaluation firm, Kimetrica, and served as the chapter president for Engineers Without Borders (EWB) at CU Boulder. Nikki loves traveling with her husband, and they enjoy getting outside to backpack with their two dogs.