Internships

Shlok Patel ’25

Major

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Project Title

How Happy Are People in Different Cities in the United States and India?

I worked on three main projects related to the Urban Nexus Lab’s goal of advancing sustainable, healthy, and equitable cities via knowledge coproduction and connecting multiple sectors across spatial scales with multiple societal outcomes. First, I helped advance the process of using scalable nondestructive methods to measure tree carbon storage and sequestration in Indian cities. I worked with light detection and ranging scanning and learned the value of conserving urban greenery to offset carbon emissions. More generally, this project helped me understand the need for more foundational research related to remote sensing and geographical information in other countries due to technological limitations. Secondly, I helped create land cover datasets through ArcGIS, a geographic information system, which helped train and validate machine learning models that improve remote sensing methods in India. This was crucial to introducing me to Urban Tree Canopy research, which nourished my interest for the third project: a research proposal studying the effects of the Urban Tree Canopy on subjective well-being. I found the proposal writing process extremely fruitful, as it introduced me to independent research and informed me on the myriad of ways that environmental research can directly and immediately impact modern society.