Divya is an India-born, Canada raised development practitioner and technologist. Her goal is to promote the use of emerging technology to improve health and economic security for marginalized groups. She holds an Bachelor’s of Applied Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia, and is now in her first year of pursuing a Masters of Public Administration in Development Practice at Columbia University.
She has successfully built cutting-edge social impact technology such as forest-fire detecting satellites, surgical robots, and autonomous medical delivery drones to try to tackle these issues. Most recently, she spent 4 years as a robotics software engineer, project manager, and technical lead in Silicon Valley at Zipline, a medical drone delivery company. Divya built algorithms for Zipline that helped scale deliveries from from 40,000 to 1 million and have been instrumental in reducing postpartum hemorrhage by a staggering 51% across Rwanda. She also spent time in Rwanda and Ghana conducting customer experience interviews to propose strategic and technical improvements to the engineering team.
Divya currently researches at the Center for Development Economics and Policy with Dr. Daniel Bjorkegren, an expert in digital transformation, into the benefits of using a TeacherAI chatbot to improve teachers’ lesson plans in Sierra Leone. At the Center for Sustainable Development, she is exploring how AI and digital technologies can feed into long-term strategies to improve health outcomes in the Middle East and North Africa Region.