[Continuing our series of posts from Terraform team members. Terraform is actively hiring for a range of roles. Send us your best one pager!]

I’m Chandhana Sathishkumar and I have an odd curiosity for plastic. I was nerd sniped randomly at a hackathon in 2022, my team’s goal was to make a biomaterial. It was very rushed but our pitch deck received a grant from Shruti Rajagopalan at Emergent Ventures, precipitating a set of unlikely coincidences that landed me at an alchemy castle called Terraform Industries. 

Plastics are everywhere. They’re wrapped around our food, woven into our clothes, stitched into medical devices, and scattered across grocery store shelves in bright, crinkly packaging. We’ve engineered thousands of variations making them arguably the most versatile material class we have. But here’s the thing: they don’t just disappear. They break down into smaller and smaller pieces, slipping into our food, our water, even our bloodstreams…with no reliable way out. And while that sounds like a sci-fi horror plot, it’s real. 

We’ve gotten better at medicine, we’ve beaten a bunch of infectious diseases, and yet, somehow, hormonal issues are on the rise. Fertility rates are dropping worldwide. It makes you wonder, are we poisoning ourselves without realizing it? It’s easy enough to test for plastic additives in your system, and let’s just say, no one has ever been excited by their results.

In mid-2024, microplastics and endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) were all over the news again. By then, I was at university in the US, doing my best to stay off social media, but people kept sending me posts about plastics. One of them caught my attention, and before I knew it, I was deep in conversations with Yaroslav Shipilov and Nat Friedman. Initially we weren’t sure whether Nat was going to support it, but it didn’t matter. Yaroslav and I hit it off and we decided we were going to work on it together no matter what. Don’t wait for external validation once you’ve reached conviction. But he did end up supporting it and this led to the creation of PlasticList along with Richel Murata and Claire Zhang. We spent months digging into the plastic content of foods in the Bay Area–something that, somehow, hadn’t been done before. 

But the real issue with plastics (and much of modern chemistry) goes deeper than waste. It’s about where we get our carbon from in the first place. Before joining TI, I hadn’t thought much about the chemical industry beyond plastics and pollution. I didn’t realize just how much of modern life relies on chemistry. Converting carbon into polymers isn’t inherently harmful. Plants have been doing this for millions of years. But we are taking carbon from deep within the Earth and putting it into the atmosphere with no plan for return, comparable to exactly what we’re doing with EDCs and our bodies.

When I first met Casey he was helping us PlasticListers understand the intricacies of a Gas Chromatography column. What was meant to be a brief encounter turned into awe at how someone knew so much about…so much. A few months later, PlasticList wrapped up, and I wondered what to do next. I had taken a gap year from school and had developed a desire to learn to build physical things. A shot-in-the-dark application, which turned into an interview, which against expectations turned into an offer. I wasn’t remotely qualified in hardware, and I knew it. But I wanted to learn. And somehow, that was enough to get my foot in the door.

Casey believes that everyone starts from zero, and he was willing to take a chance on me. So, I packed up my life in Palo Alto, crammed everything I owned into a few bags, and moved to Burbank, California, for a hardware internship.

Burbank, Los Angeles.

The work was tough though. When you jump into something completely new, step one is just mapping out everything you don’t know. Terraform strongly encourages (and gently hazes) new MechE interns with a day-one project. Mine? Installing a massive 20-foot-wide whiteboard for the magnetic kanban cards. Simple enough right? Except I had never used a power drill or jigsaw before, and every scene of Final Destination flashed in front of me as I picked them up. It was frustrating watching the rest of the team move effortlessly while I struggled to figure out which way the bit was supposed to turn. 

Whiteboard – 5, Final Destination – 0.

I thought the rest of the team would be tough on me, but they turned out to be some of the kindest and most helpful people I’ve met. I failed, learned, failed again, and kept going. It was frustrating at times, but every mistake pushed me forward. At one point, Casey told me something that stuck—learning at the fastest rate feels a lot like failing all the time. He wasn’t wrong.

This cycle repeated itself: struggle, ask questions, fail, and then eventually figure it out. Last week, I finally digested all the information relayed to me through months of whiteboard sessions with the team—messing up, figuring things out, reaching dead ends—integrated everything I had understood about different parts of the electrolyzer and learned to assemble a few cells from scratch. Although physically small, it was a mighty piece of chemistry unfolding before me. As the Binary Gas Analyzer numbers ticked up and indicated how much hydrogen and oxygen gases were being made and the electrolyte bubbled, I couldn’t help but gawk at how hard, and yet how simple, it was to make that reaction happen.

It’s pretty wild to work at Terraform. Every day, normal seeming people are going about their business just casually transforming air and water into fire at a castle! I knew all this stuff on a theoretical level since ninth grade, but now I know what it means to convince atoms to go where you want. 

Six months later, I’ve learned enough to hold my own in my area, but more importantly I’ve gained the confidence to ask questions without hesitation, to turn to my trusted advisor Ms. Claude more effectively and to know exactly who to text when I hit a wall. It has rewired how I think about the physical world, how things fit together, how they break, and most importantly, how to fix them.

Five year old Chandhana’s wish to be a princess in a castle came true in a different way than expected.

Other highlights? Hitting team milestones. Terraform has three core teams—direct air capture, hydrogen electrolysis, and the Sabatier reactor. Every month, they set themselves sprint goals that feel borderline impossible, turning it into a kind of competition. When a team pulls it off, the lead hands out prop cash, which we slap onto our desks as a reminder that we do miracles on a regular Tuesday.

One unexpected twist is I might have found a long-lost cousin? Swetha, another intern, was on her third internship when we realized our families are from the same village in India. The odds are slim, but we just sent in our 23andme tests so stay tuned.

Casey’s whiteboard sessions felt like a fever dream of ducks, springs, jets, unicycles, and ship crashes. But somehow, it all made sense by the end. Dave threw me into a world of fittings, and finding leaks turned out to be way more detective work than I expected. Russ had me flipping through entire textbooks just on nuts and bolts. Lucie made chemistry safety click. Stephanie helped design a pressure system out of janky bike pumps and plastic buckets. Xavier and Jon handed me wires, tools, and just enough patience to make sense of circuits. Trevor and Sarine helped piece together the electrolyzer, turning a pile of parts into a working machine.

Don’t ever talk to me or my son or my son’s son’s son again.

It’s funny how a simple equation like pV = nRT ends up shaping real-world engineering. I used to see it as just numbers on a page, but now it’s everywhere; in test setups, in electrolyzer challenges, in the messy process of taking a scientific concept and making it actually work. When the temperature changed in the stack and pressure spiked, purging hydrogen and oxygen accidentally pulled a vacuum in the bubblers. It was one of those moments where a textbook equation suddenly became very real. I wouldn’t have expected a high school equation to be at the center of a real problem a company is trying to solve. But if we crack it, we move the technology forward. And that’s pretty wild.

Most things really are a lot simpler yet a lot harder than they seem.

The teams flags and a functional reminder of my week one escapade.

I’ve been ridiculously lucky to spend the past six months at Terraform, working alongside some of the best people I’ve ever met. My quest continues beyond the castle into the realm of plastics.