Urban Alliance for Sustainability UAS Slow Food Nation Long Now Foundation Bioneers Literacy for Environmental Justice

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Italian Farmer exchange ~ For the Love of Food ~ Slow Food Nation 08 SolFest 2008 CitySpeaks: A Vision for Good, Sustainable and Fair Food-Mayor Gavin Newsom & Alice Waters The Big ONE

Sudeep Motupalli Rao, Ph.D.
Founder
Deep-Solutions.com and BeautifulCommunities.org

Sudeep is an activist, engineer, designer and a social entrepreneur.  He is best described as a global community engineer helping to co-design and gel elegant and potentially disruptive solutions for challenges to our social and environmental sustainability.  These solutions by design can generate a new workforce paradigm, revive the economy while building whole beautiful communities.  Some early design solutions include: an ethanol plant with sugarcane as a raw material in the sub-tropics, an in-situ remediation strategy for radioactive particles in groundwater, a biomimetic coating to protect surfaces from acid rain, a measurement technique for motors used in nanotechnology and a community-owned grocery cooperative in a high-crime food desert.  In June 2008, after more than a year of planning and visioning with community members and colleagues within the movement, he helped lead and launch the first annual Big ONE Convergence in San Francisco, to bring about a tectonic shift in our thinking about our sustainability.

An immigrant from south India, he is a chemical and environmental engineer by training and has a combined experience of 20 years working in the academic, nonprofit, government and private semiconductor industry environments.  At age 9, he became aware of the toxic hazards from mercury and chlorine that his father faced as an engineer in a chemical plant in rural India.  Later in 1984, the Bhopal toxic gas accident involving thousands of immediate deaths was etched as a seminal call to arms for better engineering, management and environmental justice.  While learning firsthand about the health impacts of coal and uranium mining on workers and nearby villagers in Bihar, in northeastern India, he resolved to become a part of the solution.

He worked to remediate the groundwater in Los Alamos, New Mexico to prevent the radioactive contamination of the Rio Grande River that supports numerous Indian tribes and our neighbor Mexico downstream.  He has strived for the last five years to rectify the environmental injustices in the southeast community of San Francisco, California especially as it relates to air pollution and has served for the last two years as the Executive Director of Literacy for Environmental Justice (LEJ) based in Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco, where he resides.

He is an elected member of the Restoration Advisory Board to cleanup the Superfund site at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco and also serves on the advisory board of the Urban Alliance for Sustainability.  He is a Community Fellow of the Full Circle Fund, an engaged philanthropy organization cultivating the next generation of community leaders and driving lasting social change in the SF Bay area.  He is a member of the Mayor’s Open Space Task Force and UCSF’s University Community Partnerships Council.  He is a Voice for Whole Communities, a nucleating group of select alumni from the Center for Whole Communities in Vermont.  He is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers-Northern California chapter.  He served as President of the United Nations Association in New Mexico and is a member of the World Affairs Council, the Commonwealth Club and the United Nations Association of USA.  He practices yoga daily and rows on a whaleboat regularly in the San Francisco bay.
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You can contact Sudeep by clicking on the message link found below the photo on the top right.