Sintana Vergara joined the World Bank’s Urban Development unit to assess and improve solid waste (trash) management in cities. Her academic background is in Environmental Engineering (BS, Cornell University; MS, UC Berkeley) and Energy and Resources (MS, PhD, UC Berkeley). She has worked with local NGOs on small-scale water treatment in Bangladesh, Mexico, and India, and on solid waste management in Colombia. Her dissertation explored the climate mitigation benefits of reuse as a waste management strategy for cities. She focused on the environmental trade-offs from informal recycling in Bogotá, Colombia, where her research was funded by a Fulbright Fellowship. She is generally interested in studying and catalyzing the use of waste as a resource, and feels very lucky that in the World Bank’s Cities and Climate Change group, she can explore two fascinating modern phenomena: garbage and cities