Shriya Danekar

Shriya Danekar is passionate about the environment and issues like climate change, pollution, the depletion of natural resources and ecosystems. 

Her desire to participate in research, learn about sustainability and technologies that can help the environment led her to study environmental engineering at the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University.

While at ASU, Danekar took part in an Engineering Projects in Community Service sustainability project that helped shrimp farmers in Vietnam analyze water quality, then provided recommendations to improve it to increase shrimp production. 

“I visited Vietnam and interviewed the farmers with my team,” she says. “We realized the drawbacks in our old solution and came up with a plan to improve our project once we came back.”

As a Grand Challenges Scholar, Danekar participated in a research experience in hydrology exploring how climate change affects water scarcity in the Colorado River Basin using historical climate data.

“With guidance from my research mentor, I created a statistical model to study this relationship and helped generate future projections of streamflow and climate prediction scenarios using my model,” she says. “This has bigger implications for understanding water availability using demand and supply of water in the Colorado River Basin.”

Danekar says the support she received from her research mentor, Associate Professor Margaret Garcia, was important to her success.

“She helped me understand the problem we were trying to solve, provided resources and guided me whenever I got stuck,” Danekar says. 

She’s proud her research was featured in ASU News and Fulton Forge for spring 2025.

“ASU President Michael Crow sent me a letter acknowledging my research contributions,” Danekar says. “This was surprising and very motivating for me to keep going through difficult semesters and tough workload.”

Danekar is grateful for the Martin H. Rosness Scholarship, which motivated her to keep her grades up. She passed the Fundamentals of Engineering Environment Exam, and is a Moeur Award recipient.

After graduation, Danekar will work in the environmental field for a few years, then pursue a master’s degree.

“There are so many environmental engineering, consulting, research and professional career pathways that can get you to the place you want to be,” she says.

Favorites

Hobby: Music
TV show: The Big Bang Theory
Movie: Interstellar
Activity: Swimming
Book: There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

Read about other exceptional graduates of the Fulton Schools’ spring 2026 class.

Written by Lisa Irish