CLIMATE & ECOLOGICAL SCIENCE

As a scientist and climate educator who offers consultations to many organizations, Kritee’s expertise is shaped by over 25 years of rigorous Earth System, Ecological and Climate research experience at some of the most prestigious academic, non-profit and multilateral government organizations in the world. Her understanding of the polycrisis comes from her science-based policy advocacy for human and environmental health. She has published peer reviewed research articles on a wide range of topics, from processes occurring at the scale of atoms to landscape level processes in farming ecosystems across Asia.

As Kritee continues to engage in educational and grassroots advocacy efforts as a Zen and Ecodharma teacher, she draws on lessons gathered during decades of work within science and policy circles. She understands the strengths and weaknesses of mainstream science supported by modernity. She sees how powerful the reductionist models of looking at the world are and how they sometimes fail terribly in creating a wholesome or sacred view of our precious human and ecological lives.

Professional Background

Kritee received her Bachelors and Masters from the Indian Institute of Technology (New Delhi), a premier engineering institute in India. She was engaged in computational and molecular biology, and cancer research between 1998 and 2001. Thereafter, she received a fellowship to join a Ph.D. program at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She did her interdisciplinary Ph.D. research at the Department of Microbiology and Biochemistry at Rutgers in collaboration with the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at University of Michigan. In 2008, she was awarded Dreyfus Post-doctoral Fellowship in the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University. Between 2011 and 2023, she worked at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a leading nonprofit in the US working on all aspects of the climate crisis. During her time with EDF, she collaborated with many leading organizations across the world. Please see her detailed Curriculum Vitae for more details.

Doctoral and Post-doctoral Research
The focus of her Ph.D. research was mercury (Hg), which is a trace element of grave human health and environmental concern. Her cross-disciplinary and collaborative research resulted in the first-ever discovery of microbial stable isotope fractionation of Hg. Her research suggested that isotope ‘fingerprints’ can be used to track and differentiate between different sources of Hg contamination. Her post-doctoral research at Princeton University included the study of nitrogen (N), a major limiting nutrient that can control the extent of land and oceanic carbon fixation, and ultimately climate change. Many of her research articles have been cited hundreds of times by other researchers across the world.

Research and Advocacy at Environmental Defense Fund
At EDF, Kritee helped accelerate rural poverty alleviation, and strengthen climate adaptation and mitigation. For many years, she directed a multi-partner and multi-lingual research team working on “Climate Smart Agriculture” at multiple laboratories across the states of Bihar, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Orissa in rural India. These labs helped measure how crop yields, soil health and income improve while reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in response to new farming practices. Thus, Kritee helped lay the groundwork for jurisdictional level government action on land use change. She also provided scientific input to EDF’s domestic legal teams’ efforts to improve government policies related to the energy sector, with a focus on mercury pollution.

She has also led the designing and execution of EDF’s Climate Smart Agriculture training curriculum for Indian NGOs, governments and corporations that is currently training tens of thousands of agricultural extension workers across India.