Shreyaa Raghavan’s journey into fixing among 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. By 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 pc science profession appear to be an apparent alternative, however Raghavan says a big 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, Programs, and Society. “However whereas I at all times felt like constructing cell apps was a enjoyable little pastime, it didn’t really feel like I used to be straight fixing societal challenges.”
Her perspective shifted when, as an MIT undergraduate, Raghavan participated in an Undergraduate Analysis Alternative within the Photovoltaic Analysis Laboratory, now generally 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 software of her abilities 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 had been hardcore engineers. All of them had been speaking successfully and dealing towards one unified purpose — constructing higher renewable vitality techniques,” Raghavan says. “It opened my eyes to the truth that I may use very technical instruments that I get pleasure from constructing and discover success in that by serving to clear up main local weather challenges.”
Together 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 techniques, a area that resonated with Raghavan attributable to 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 the entire clever techniques 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 important factor of each the financial system and local weather change, so potential modifications to transportation have to be fastidiously studied,” Wu says. “Shreyaa’s analysis into sensible congestion administration is necessary as a result of it takes a data-driven method 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 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 techniques comparable to networked autonomous autos and digital pace limits that modify based on site visitors situations — options that would advance decarbonization within the transportation part at comparatively low price and within the close to time period.
Raghavan says she appreciates the Accenture Fellowship not just for the help it offers, but in addition as a result of it demonstrates business involvement in sustainable transportation options.
“It’s necessary for the sector of transportation, and in addition vitality and local weather as an entire, to synergize with the entire totally different stakeholders,” she says. “I believe it’s necessary for business to be concerned on this challenge of incorporating smarter transportation techniques to decarbonize transportation.”
Raghavan has additionally acquired 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 business facet with Accenture,” she says.
Raghavan believes that addressing local weather change requires collaboration throughout disciplines. “I believe with local weather change, nobody business or area goes to resolve it by itself. It’s actually acquired to be every area stepping up and making an attempt 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 totally different individuals, totally different angles, totally different disciplines.”
With that in thoughts, Raghavan has been very lively 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 solution to meet heaps of people that had been working towards the identical purpose, the identical local weather targets, the identical passions, however from fully totally 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’ll 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’ll get entangled.”
Raghavan has embraced her space of research 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.”
