Ilse Ruiz-Mercado is a Ph.D. student in Civil and Environmental Engineering and a student researcher in Environmental Health Sciences at UC Berkeley. Her current research focuses on cookstove adoption and household behavior related to indoor air pollution. She is interested in the combination of IT-based sensor data with social sciences and epidemiological methods to understand how household and community behavior shapes the way rural populations use appropriate technologies. She is a researcher in the CRECER-Guatemala stove trial and a collaborator in the Patsari Project, where she has developed instrumental methods of impact assessment and carbon credit verification like the Stove Use Monitors (SUMs).