Meet Poonam Verma, a science teacher from Bulandshahr, UP, India who is a participant in OFC’s algal bloom project, working tirelessly with her students to monitor algal bloom in their local waterbody. With OFC’s help, Poonam guided her students to take algal images using foldscope (bottom row showing images taken by her team) and assemble a frugal spectroscope (top row showing an observed spectrum from an algal sample), to quantify algal bloom! OFC thanks her for all her efforts and wishes her

D. Snehalatha is a lecturer at Telangana Social Welfare Residential Degree & PG college for women since 2019. She started her journey from a small village. She says “Even though my parents are uneducated, they encouraged me a lot in my studies. From childhood, I had a passion for teaching. I am grateful for the opportunity by Open Field Collective to monitor algal bloom”.

Sumathi Natrajan is a lecturer at Telangana Social Welfare Residential Degree & PG college for women since 2019, a government organization that provides free education to women from marginalized families to make them independent. Some of her students are part of the Algal Bloom monitoring project run by Open Field Collective where they have been collecting water samples from a mini pond in NFC Nagar in East Hyderabad, Telangana since November 2021.