I am Jon Bessette, a mechanical engineer (SUNY Buffalo BS '20) and scientist (MIT PhD '25) by training. I'm an Activate Fellow, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, SUNY Chancellor's Awardee, and former Fulbright scholar. Currently, I'm working on building KIRA (www.kira.eco): it's our mission to transform industrial wastewater into clean water for datacenters, lowering costs and enabling resource recovery. I love building real hardware that makes a strong and scaled impact on the world. Much of my background has been in deploying IoT hardware in water treatment in places from India and the Middle East to the American Southwest.