Marcos Rios

Age: 21

Home Town: Kennesaw, Georgia

Education: B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University

Specific Field Interests: Infrastructure and Resource Equity, Sustainable Entrepreneurship, Transportation Systems

Placement: Utthan, Bhavnagar, Gujarat

Area of Focus: Women entrepreneurship, Livelihoods, Sustainable farming

Fellowship Project: Implementing a robust monitoring and evaluation system to track the performance of woman-led services and evaluating community impact, while promoting sustainable agriculture techniques.

Highlights: Marcos is serving as an American India Foundation (AIF) Banyan Impact Fellow with Utthan, in Bhavnagar, Gujarat. He is a recent graduate from Northwestern University, where he studied Industrial Engineering with minors in Data Science and Transportation & Logistics. While there, he interned at the Center for Development and Integration (CDI) in Hanoi, Vietnam, where he developed monitoring & evaluation systems as well as performed data analysis for labor rights and sustainable agriculture projects. His prior research work includes analyzing infrastructure indicators in COVID-19 vaccine supply chains, relationships between bike-sharing systems and racial equity, and Buddhist religious rhetoric in Sri Lankan non-profits, with his final capstone examining the relationships between bus delays and racial disparities in the Chicago area. He looks forward to his time with Utthan and hopes to develop his rural operations skills, Hindi and Gujarati language, and understanding of impact-oriented entrepreneurship.