What makes me tick

Oscar Kavanagh is a 2022 graduate from Carnegie Mellon with a working passion to enhance society’s state of affairs surrounding sustainability, technology ethics, and human expression. Born in Dublin, Ireland, Oscar grew up in rural South Dakota, going on to found FarmOne, an energy intelligence startup accelerating the advent of agricultural sustainability. He is also the director of Funding Reservation Education Equality, more commonly known as the FREE Nonprofit, which fights to lower the disparities in K-12 education standards and living conditions between Native American Reservations and the rest of the United States.

At Carnegie Mellon, Oscar enjoys extensive academic interests, conducting research with the social decision science, economic and computer science departments, as well as through a behavioral economics collaboration with faculty from the University of Oxford. He also writes articles covering tech affairs, AI governance, design, and the environment. On campus, Oscar strives to engage his campus community with educational efforts spanning sustainable development and self-starting through his executive role at the Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Association, as well as product design and all things venture capital as the school ambassador for AWS University. In his studies, Oscar pursues a B.S. in Business Administration at the Tepper School of Business with minors in Human-Computer Interaction Design and the SHIFT honors capstone (Social and Human Impact of Future Technologies).

Since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, Oscar has worked closely with leading international market forecasting models and economic data, and produces behavioral economics research findings under the guidance of American economist Dr. George Loewenstein. He also promotes sustainable investment solutions to American agribusinesses with FarmOne Inc, which seeks to help farmers reach climate benchmarks and energy sovereignty. Both works have been ongoing, with the exception of the summer of 2021, which he spent working as a Program Management Intern at AWS.

“While I continue my work back home in South Dakota and on campus, I share great enthusiasm for the future. Since starting at CMU in 2018, I’ve been exposed to a world of cutting-edge research, cross-disciplinary engagement, and droves of technological opportunity. In this new website, I hope you’ll stay posted and revisit as I continue to populate ongoing projects, writings, and other snippets worth sharing.”

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