Uthara (Thara) Srinivasan, of Berkeley, California, passed away suddenly from natural causes on April 18, 2024, one month after her 50th birthday. Born in Jamshedpur, India, on March 18, 1974, she moved with her family to Homewood, Illinois, south of Chicago, when she was a baby. She was known for her boundless enthusiasm, thoughtful generosity, 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. Valedictorian of her high school class and an accomplished flutist and artist, she was accepted into every university she applied to. She turned down Harvard to attend Princeton, where her academic success continued. She double-majored in Chemical Engineering and Creative Writing and excelled in both, graduating Summa Cum Laude. In pursuit of her secondary major, she studied with Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Russell Banks. No challenge was too great for Thara, as evidenced by her writing not one but two senior theses, even while playing flute in the Princeton University Orchestra, taking painting classes, and leading an active social life including plenty of dancing.
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.’” How fitting that someone with so many dimensions should have three names! They soon became best friends and bonded over flute and piano duets, and were inseparable for the rest of their 29 years together.
In graduate school in Chemical Engineering at UC Berkeley, Thara 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 dissertation, 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 UC 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, some people familiar with her work wondered whether the Pope was influenced by Thara’s seminal paper, although the encyclical did not reference any scientific literature.
In addition to her scientific work, Thara continuously pursued creative writing as well. In the 2000s she became a prolific poet, publishing her work in multiple top-notch poetry journals alongside Jane Hirshfield and Rita Dove. Then in 2008, Thara and John spent a brief time in Leuven, Belgium for John’s work, where a new inspiration struck: Thara started a middle grade 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 his Indian grandmother. She came tantalizingly close to finishing the story before she passed away.
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 and breathwork with qigong elements. Her workshops 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.’” Thara was also a regular at Wen Wu School in El Cerrito, where she learned and practiced qigong, Shaolin kung fu, and taiji. In early 2024, Thara joined the Mahea Uchiyama Center for International Dance, where she greatly enjoyed learning Hawaiian dancing and sewing her own pā’ū, a traditional skirt. She was just completing the introductory dance class whereupon a Hawaiian name was bestowed upon her: “Mino’akakailialoha,” the love-fetching smile.
In 2011 and 2013, her children Leena and Rohan were born, and during the subsequent years Thara continued to teach yoga, work on her Golden Bee manuscript, and also pursue scientific work on overfishing, an offshoot of her PNAS paper. She was particularly devoted to participating in children’s classrooms, teaching yoga at Gay Austin preschool, giving tours at the UC Botanical Garden where she was also a docent, hosting Divali celebrations at Ruth Acty Elementary School, 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 to learn that 350,000 plastic cups had been used for the event 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 raised enough funding to offset the carbon emissions of 25% of overall worldwide reunions travel, and spearheaded the adoption of a reusable cup service that has saved more than 100,000 single-use plastic cups from landfill.
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, yoga and movement practices, scientific and environmental work, and her love of nature. Her passionate devotion to making the world better in so many ways made her a guiding light to many. How fitting that “Uthara” literally means “north star” in Sanskrit.
She is survived by her husband John, her kids Leena (b. 2011) and Rohan (b. 2013), her parents Rukmini and Narayana Srinivasan of Gaithersburg, MD, and her sister Pritha Srinivasan of Potomac, MD. As a living memorial, her family has adopted the rimu tree in the UC Botanical Garden (Australasian Area).
