Sanjana Paul is the executive director and co-founder of Earth Hacks. She holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and physics, and currently works as an atmospheric science software developer at NASA. Previously, she worked as an NSF REU participant in extreme ultraviolet engineering in the Kapteyn-Murnane Lab in JILA at the University of Colorado Boulder, and as a Conservation Innovation Fellow at Conservation X Labs.

Sanjana is dedicated to making the engineering community a more inclusive space by putting people of color and women in leadership positions. She started Earth Hacks to support students to create environmental hackathons, with the intention of providing resources, support, and spaces for students of all backgrounds to explore their ideas, act on their environmental anxiety, and use these hackathons as starting points for environmental innovation, so they can then walk away with tangible prototypes of ideas they could then expand upon. Sanjana and Earth Hacks ultimate goal is to use the hackathon innovation model to combat the climate crisis. To do that over the next two years Sanjana aims to lead the effort to center environmental justice in the tech space and get over 5,000 hackers to contribute their technical skills to advancing a constellation of existing environmental projects by pioneering our community-partner-based capillary action model.