Shreyaa Raghavan’s journey into fixing a few of the world’s hardest challenges began with a easy love for puzzles. By highschool, her knack for problem-solving naturally drew her to laptop science. By means of her participation in an entrepreneurship and management program, she constructed apps and twice made it to the semifinals of this system’s world competitors.
Her early successes made a laptop science profession look like an apparent selection, however Raghavan says a major competing curiosity left her torn.
“Pc science sparks that puzzle-, problem-solving a part of my mind,” says Raghavan ’24, an Accenture Fellow and a PhD candidate in MIT’s Institute for Knowledge, Programs, and Society. “However whereas I at all times felt like constructing cell apps was a enjoyable little interest, it didn’t really feel like I used to be instantly fixing societal challenges.”
Her perspective shifted when, as an MIT undergraduate, Raghavan participated in an Undergraduate Analysis Alternative within the Photovoltaic Analysis Laboratory, now often known as the Accelerated Supplies Laboratory for Sustainability. There, she found how computational methods like machine studying may optimize supplies for photo voltaic panels — a direct utility of her expertise towards mitigating local weather change.
“This lab had a really numerous group of individuals, some from a pc science background, some from a chemistry background, some who have been hardcore engineers. All of them have been speaking successfully and dealing towards one unified objective — constructing higher renewable vitality methods,” Raghavan says. “It opened my eyes to the truth that I may use very technical instruments that I take pleasure in constructing and discover achievement in that by serving to clear up main local weather challenges.”
Along with her sights set on making use of machine studying and optimization to vitality and local weather, Raghavan joined Cathy Wu’s lab when she began her PhD in 2023. The lab focuses on constructing extra sustainable transportation methods, a area that resonated with Raghavan on account of its common impression and its outsized function in local weather change — transportation accounts for roughly 30 % of greenhouse gasoline emissions.
“If we have been to throw the entire clever methods we’re exploring into the transportation networks, by how a lot may we scale back emissions?” she asks, summarizing a core query of her analysis.
Wu, an affiliate professor within the Division of Civil and Environmental Engineering, stresses the worth of Raghavan’s work.
“Transportation is a vital component of each the economic system and local weather change, so potential modifications to transportation should be rigorously studied,” Wu says. “Shreyaa’s analysis into good congestion administration is necessary as a result of it takes a data-driven strategy so as to add rigor to the broader analysis supporting sustainability.”
Raghavan’s contributions have been acknowledged with the Accenture Fellowship, a cornerstone of the MIT-Accenture Convergence Initiative for Business and Expertise.
As an Accenture Fellow, she is exploring the potential impression of applied sciences for avoiding stop-and-go site visitors and its emissions, utilizing methods similar to networked autonomous automobiles and digital velocity limits that modify in accordance with site visitors circumstances — options that might advance decarbonization within the transportation part at comparatively low value and within the close to time period.
Raghavan says she appreciates the Accenture Fellowship not just for the help it gives, but in addition as a result of it demonstrates business involvement in sustainable transportation options.
“It’s necessary for the sphere of transportation, and in addition vitality and local weather as a complete, to synergize with the entire completely different stakeholders,” she says. “I feel it’s necessary for business to be concerned on this difficulty of incorporating smarter transportation methods to decarbonize transportation.”
Raghavan has additionally obtained a fellowship supporting her analysis from the U.S. Division of Transportation.
“I feel it’s actually thrilling that there’s curiosity from the coverage facet with the Division of Transportation and from the business facet with Accenture,” she says.
Raghavan believes that addressing local weather change requires collaboration throughout disciplines. “I feel with local weather change, nobody business or area goes to unravel it by itself. It’s actually obtained to be every area stepping up and attempting to make a distinction,” she says. “I don’t assume there’s any silver-bullet resolution to this drawback. It’s going to take many various options from completely different individuals, completely different angles, completely different disciplines.”
With that in thoughts, Raghavan has been very energetic within the MIT Vitality and Local weather Membership since becoming a member of about three years in the past, which, she says, “was a extremely cool option to meet heaps of people that have been working towards the identical objective, the identical local weather targets, the identical passions, however from utterly completely different angles.”
This 12 months, Raghavan is on the group and schooling group, which works to construct the group at MIT that’s engaged on local weather and vitality points. As a part of that work, Raghavan is launching a mentorship program for undergraduates, pairing them with graduate college students who assist the undergrads develop concepts about how they will work on local weather utilizing their distinctive experience.
“I didn’t foresee myself utilizing my laptop science expertise in vitality and local weather,” Raghavan says, “so I actually need to give different college students a transparent pathway, or a transparent sense of how they will become involved.”
Raghavan has embraced her space of examine even by way of the place she likes to assume.
“I like engaged on trains, on buses, on airplanes,” she says. “It’s actually enjoyable to be in transit and dealing on transportation issues.”
Anticipating a visit to New York to go to a cousin, she holds no dread for the lengthy practice journey.
“I do know I’m going to do a few of my greatest work throughout these hours,” she says. “4 hours there. 4 hours again.”
