Uthara Srinivasan's Obituary
Thara Srinivasan, of Berkeley, California, passed away on April 18, 2024, one month after her 50th birthday. She was born in Jamshedpur, India, on March 18, 1974, and moved to Homewood, IL (South suburbs of Chicago) as a baby. She was known for her extraordinary generosity, boundless enthusiasm, and her uncompromising love and respect for the natural world.
Thara was much less known for her extraordinary accomplishments because they were hidden behind a cloak of modesty and an infectious self-deprecating smile. As a child, she was famous in Chicago’s South suburbs for being the most accomplished student in a generation. Valedictorian of her high school class, and an accomplished flutist and artist, she was accepted into every university she applied to. She turned down the likes of Harvard to attend Princeton, where her academic success continued (which she of course strived to keep secret). She double-majored in Chemical Engineering and Creative Writing and excelled in both, graduating Summa Cum Laude. No challenge was too great for Thara, as evidenced by her writing not one but two senior theses. In pursuit of her secondary major, she studied with Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Russell Banks.
Thara then came to UC Berkeley for graduate school, where she fell in love with the diversity of Berkeley, the natural beauty of the Bay Area, and the intellectual enthusiasm of the university community. Within the first few months she met her future husband, John Heck, at the International House. At a chance meeting of friends in the I-House cafe, he recalls her introduction: “I’m Thara, my real name is Uthara, but my sister calls me ‘Uthie’”, to which he clumsily replied, “Three names? Wow, I’m John, but my sister just called me ‘baby.’” Thara was apparently not turned off, because they stayed devoted to each other for the rest of their 29 years together.
For her dissertation work, Thara struck her own path. She became a recognized expert in her field, first creating a new class of frictionless coatings for micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). Seeking a more original project for her doctoral work, she started an entirely new field of fluidic micro self-assembly, in which she could make microscopic pieces such as mirrors align and adhere to microscopic mechanical actuators, all in a beaker full of fluid. After receiving their PhDs, Thara and John were married at the Brazilian Room in Tilden Park in 2001.
After a brief stint in silicon valley working in the field of bio-MEMS, Thara became distressed at the state of the environment and decided to return to Berkeley to pursue postdoctoral research in ecology and environmental policy. True to her nature, she took on an audacious goal: to quantify the total cost of global environmental damage, and to assess the distribution of damages between poor and rich nations. The resulting article was a blockbuster: “The debt of nations and the distribution of ecological impacts from human activities” was published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008. When Pope Francis published in 2015 the encyclical Laudato Si, also stating that climate change’s grave damages are caused by rich countries and are disproportionately borne by poor countries, many wondered whether the pope was influenced by Thara’s seminal paper (which will never be known for sure, because encyclicals only reference the Bible and prior popes’ statements, rather than scientific literature)!
Also in 2008, Thara and John spent a brief time in Leuven, Belgium for John’s work. While there, Thara began to turn her attention to her other passion: children’s literature. She was inspired to begin a children’s novel, “The League of the Golden Bee,” a story of mixed-race siblings, Kiran, Rohan, and Satya, who visit Belgium and need to solve a mystery of a pending honeybee extinction in order to save the lives of Kiran and Neela Patti (his grandmother). She came tantalizingly close to finishing the story before she passed away so suddenly.
Thara was also a certified yoga instructor, completing her training at The Yoga Room in Berkeley, one of the first such institutes in California. She taught a devoted group of students for many years, and frequently gave workshops integrating yoga with Qi Gong and even Shaolin Kung Fu elements. Her workshops in particular were well attended, and she often donated all proceeds to charities in particular need at the time. As one of her students aptly put it, Thara “embodied the principle of ‘think globally and act locally.’”
In 2011 and 2013, Leena and Rohan were born, and during the subsequent years Thara continued to teach yoga, write her Golden Bee novel, and also pursue scientific work on overfishing (stemming from her PNAS paper). She was particularly devoted to participating in the schools while her children were young, teaching yoga to preschoolers, giving tours at the UC Botanical Garden where she was a docent, hosting Divali celebrations in the classroom, complete with Diya (oil lamp) painting and reading from The Ramayana, and doing holiday crafts.
Upon attending her 20th college reunion in 2015, Thara was appalled about the massive number of plastic cups (350,000) that were used without any regard for the environmental impact, and decided to do something about it. She became the driving force behind an effort to “green” Princeton’s Reunions, by identifying and quantifying the worst environmental impacts in order to mitigate them. With dogged determination, influencing the university and the individual classes, she spearheaded the adoption of a reusable cup service that has saved >100,000 single-use plastic cups (and growing).
Unfortunately, two ill-advised back surgeries in her 20’s caused severe chronic pain and health issues. Rightly ignoring many doctors’ advice to take opiates in the early 2000s, she instead channeled her energy into her many passions: her children, her yoga practice, her scientific and environmental pursuits, and her love of nature. Most importantly, she valued connecting with other people through acts of generosity, friendship, and working with joint purpose to make the world a better place. Thara’s devotion to helping others and preserving our natural world, and her conviction to thrive in spite of severe health challenges remain an inspiration to all of those whose lives she touched.
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