Shreyaa Raghavan’s journey into fixing a number of the world’s hardest challenges began with a easy love for puzzles. By highschool, her knack for problem-solving naturally drew her to pc science. Via her participation in an entrepreneurship and management program, she constructed apps and twice made it to the semifinals of this system’s international competitors.
Her early successes made a pc science profession look like an apparent alternative, 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 Information, Methods, 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 immediately fixing societal challenges.”
Her perspective shifted when, as an MIT undergraduate, Raghavan participated in an Undergraduate Analysis Alternative within the Photovoltaic Analysis Laboratory, now referred to as the Accelerated Supplies Laboratory for Sustainability. There, she found how computational methods like machine studying might optimize supplies for photo voltaic panels — a direct software of her abilities towards mitigating local weather change.
“This lab had a really various group of individuals, some from a pc science background, some from a chemistry background, some who had been hardcore engineers. All of them had 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 might use very technical instruments that I take pleasure in constructing and discover success in that by serving to resolve 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 discipline that resonated with Raghavan because of its common impression and its outsized function in local weather change — transportation accounts for roughly 30 % of greenhouse gasoline emissions.
“If we had been to throw all the clever methods we’re exploring into the transportation networks, by how a lot might we cut 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 ingredient of each the economic system and local weather change, so potential adjustments to transportation have to be fastidiously studied,” Wu says. “Shreyaa’s analysis into sensible congestion administration is vital 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 Trade and Know-how.
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 reminiscent of networked autonomous autos and digital pace limits that adjust in line with site visitors situations — options that would 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 assist it offers, but additionally as a result of it demonstrates trade involvement in sustainable transportation options.
“It’s vital for the sector of transportation, and likewise vitality and local weather as a complete, to synergize with all the completely different stakeholders,” she says. “I believe it’s vital for trade to be concerned on this problem 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 believe it’s actually thrilling that there’s curiosity from the coverage facet with the Division of Transportation and from the trade facet with Accenture,” she says.
Raghavan believes that addressing local weather change requires collaboration throughout disciplines. “I believe with local weather change, nobody trade or discipline goes to unravel it by itself. It’s actually acquired to be every discipline stepping up and making an attempt to make a distinction,” she says. “I don’t assume there’s any silver-bullet resolution to this downside. It’s going to take many alternative options from completely different folks, completely different angles, completely different disciplines.”
With that in thoughts, Raghavan has been very energetic within the MIT Power and Local weather Membership since becoming a member of about three years in the past, which, she says, “was a extremely cool approach to meet heaps of people that had been working towards the identical objective, the identical local weather objectives, the identical passions, however from fully completely different angles.”
This yr, Raghavan is on the neighborhood and training crew, which works to construct the neighborhood 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 pc science abilities in vitality and local weather,” Raghavan says, “so I actually wish to give different college students a transparent pathway, or a transparent sense of how they will get entangled.”
Raghavan has embraced her space of examine even when it comes to the place she likes to assume.
“I really 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 prepare journey.
“I do know I’m going to do a few of my finest work throughout these hours,” she says. “4 hours there. 4 hours again.”
