By Chandler Precht (’22SPS, Sustainability Science), Director, External Affairs and Communications, and Lecturer in Professional Studies, M.S. In Sustainability Management, Columbia University School of Professional Studies, Office of Environmental Professional Programs
Sumana Palle’s sustainability work has taken her from engaging with rural communities in India to getting involved in humanitarian and disaster resilience efforts, climate research, corporate sustainability, and entrepreneurship. A recent graduate of Columbia University’s M.S. in Sustainability Management (SUMA) program, Palle has built a career at the intersection of climate, technology, and human impact, drawing connections across sectors that are often treated as separate.
Her work has included supporting water-efficient agriculture and women’s entrepreneurship in Rajasthan, contributing to disaster preparedness and humanitarian initiatives, and applying climate risk and sustainability frameworks within the rapidly evolving AI sector. At Columbia, she also co-founded NAVI, a digital accessibility tool that received the 2026 Helen Gurley Brown Foundation Prize and won third place in the 2026 Greater Good Challenge.
I caught up with Palle about the experiences that shaped her path to sustainability, the connections she sees between climate resilience and technology, and how her time at Columbia helped her connect seemingly disparate interests into a cohesive career.
Your work spans everything from rural development and disaster preparedness to climate risk, humanitarian affairs, and entrepreneurship. What connects all of those areas for you?
These are all heavily connected domains and are really just different points on one timeline or different dimensions of the same underlying issues. My entry into the field was rural development, but very quickly I realized how vulnerable the farmers I was working with were to climate change, and how the people with the least always face the most risk. This is what drives my career — how do we address socio-environmental inequities in all the ways they manifest?
Palle gathers indigenous technical ecological knowledge to help design water-catchment structures and document underground aquifers in Rajasthan, India.
Before joining Columbia, you worked as an SBI Youth for India Fellow on rural development, indigenous agriculture, water-scarce environments, and women’s entrepreneurship. How did that experience shape the way you think about sustainability today?
Working on that project rewired my brain and taught me how deep change comes about: through generations of dutiful work in the hope of a better tomorrow. Real societal change depends on sustained critical mass. And for someone in the social sector, the goal is to attain that critical mass, not focus on the individual impact you have.
It also showed me how interconnected everything is. The project started out addressing the water scarcity in the region. We then identified local agriculture as the main source of water consumption, so I introduced water-efficient crops, like lemongrass and chamomile, in addition to farm-level water budgeting and village-level catchment construction. However, supply chain and capacity-building became a challenge. Farmers needed to harvest and process their crops for the highest possible profit and needed access to market linkages to sell their products, so I trained local tribal women to harvest the crops and distill them into highly profitable essential oils and teas, and helped connect them to regional aggregators and export markets. Ultimately, this project increased the income of participating farmers by 20–40% and created a revenue stream for tribal women entrepreneurs that didn’t exist before. You cannot have rural development without women’s entrepreneurship, and you cannot address water scarcity without understanding how indigenous agriculture fits into it.
Kanku Bai holds lemongrass essential oil produced from crops grown on her farm in Rajasthan, India.
More recently, you’ve had the opportunity to work on sustainability at CoreWeave. What has that experience shown you about the role the private sector can play in addressing climate challenges?
So much! It’s been a behind-the-scenes peek into the rocket ship that is the AI industry, with one of the best sustainability teams around. It taught me how dedicated the corporate sustainability world is to tackling our energy and infrastructure challenges, and how often sustainability is also a strong business case. With so much of CoreWeave’s business relying on physical assets (data centers), paying attention to climate risk is imperative for long-term business viability. Being on the inside from such an early stage, it was rewarding to help the sustainability team build that case to leadership. Plus, it’s been the perfect playground to implement and apply what I’ve learned in the classroom.
You recently won the 2026 Helen Gurley Brown Foundation Prize for NAVI, your digital accessibility software — congratulations! Can you tell me more about the project and the inspiration behind it?
Like a lot of things over the last two years for me, NAVI was born out of friendships in the SUMA program. A good friend, Nada (Qotrunnada Maulina), noticed that a student in a class she was assisting faced significant barriers doing her homework because existing screen readers, Microsoft Excel, and Google Sheets couldn’t accommodate her visual impairment. What followed was friends coming together to build a prototype that attaches to Excel and Google Sheets and uses voice commands to navigate and edit a spreadsheet.
It’s important to us to address the issue of digital accessibility. So many people with visual impairments are shut out of the workplace because of the limitations of the tools available, and in the age of AI and other frontier technology, it is unacceptable that anyone is so squarely excluded from opportunity. We first thought our tool was hyper-niche, but have been blown away by the response and feedback, with people across demographics mentioning how difficult or intimidating they find popular workplace tools, indicating how NAVI could reach folks beyond the blind and visually impaired (BVI) community.
And what has the process of actually building NAVI taught you about accessibility and human-centered design?
I am a total techno-optimist. I truly believe technology has the power to augment and uplift human potential and make equity truly possible. And that is the spirit of NAVI. The issue with mainstream “accessibility” products is that accessibility gets bolted on at the end of product design, if at all. Through NAVI, I have learned to properly co-design and seen the rigorous iteration (and the amazing payoff) it entails — products should be built with the people they are designed for, not for them. It has been very difficult building a product for an experience and way of life I fundamentally don’t understand, but adhering to principles of co-design has really helped.
How would you describe your experience in the SUMA program and at Columbia?
The SUMA program has been a dream come true! I chose it over other programs for its flexible curriculum, technical classes, and focus on practical application, and I have not regretted it once. My cohort is also incredibly close and supportive; everyone genuinely looks out for each other and wants the absolute best for each other. The faculty and administration are also so approachable and friendly, and they go out of their way to support you. Coming to Columbia has been easily one of the best decisions I’ve made!
Are there any courses or experiences at Columbia that have been especially meaningful, or that you’d recommend to other students?
I recommend the Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Measuring and Minimizing the Carbon Footprint course with Ryan Meinke and Jon Dickinson — they’re great, and the class was instrumental in securing my EDF Fellowship with CoreWeave. I also love our ability to cross-register. Some of my favorite classes include Agroecology: A Natural Climate Solution with Yushu Xia offered by the M.S. in Sustainability Science program (MoSSS), along with two courses offered by the Climate School: Computing and Research Methods for Climate Data Science with Dhruv Balwada, and Machine Learning for Climate Science and Environmental Sustainability with Kara Lamb. Learning Python in those classes was a total game-changer and directly shaped my work at the United Nations, my fellowship at CoreWeave, and my independent study.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia University School of Professional Studies or Columbia University.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program, offered by the Office of Environmental Professional Programs in the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School, provides students with cutting-edge policy and management tools to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as a full-time and part-time course of study. The program fosters creativity and adaptability by equipping students with the skills to tackle real-world sustainability challenges through an interdisciplinary approach from the world’s premier sustainability academics, researchers, and practitioners. The up-to-the-minute curriculum and flexibility prepare graduates for careers in the dynamic and rapidly changing field of sustainability.
Learn more about the program here.
