Yunus Kovankaya is a third year Civil Engineering Major, concentrating in Water Resources and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University. He is currently developing a general optimization model that can identify effective, low-cost decentralized networks for wastewater treatment for any community within the United States. Outside of the Water Center, he works on increasing accessibility to potable water in remote rural areas as a water team lead for Columbia University’s Engineers Without Borders Ghana chapter. In the past, he has presented research on identifying areas vulnerable to power outages during hurricanes at the Transportation Research Board Conference and co-authored a paper on classifying Turkish Makam music using topological data analysis.
Research Areas: Water systems in rural areas, optimizing recovery from natural disasters, and decentralized wastewater treatment.