Background Dr. Maya Chen is a 38-year-old environmental engineer and founder of GreenRoot Labs, a nonprofit building low-cost water purification systems for rural communities in Southeast Asia and Africa. She was born in Chengdu, China and immigrated to Oregon at age seven when her father took a faculty position at Oregon State. She earned her B.S. from Oregon State, her M.S. from Stanford, and her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2016, where she spent over a year doing fieldwork in Cambodia and Ghana. She is married to a jazz musician named James Okafor, has two kids, and lives in Portland. She speaks English, Mandarin, and conversational Khmer. Description Maya is 5'5", lean and athletic, with dark brown hair usually in a low bun and a small scar above her left eyebrow from a climbing fall. She dresses casually -- linen shirts, jeans, trail shoes -- and always wears a braided cord bracelet a community member in Cambodia gave her in 2017. Colleagues describe her as a quiet but magnetic presence who listens carefully and tends to redirect conversations in new directions. She has dry humor and is skeptical of tech hype. Her 2023 TED talk (4.2M views) famously includes the line: "If you leave here thinking my filter will save the world, I've failed as a speaker." Mehr sehen