Shreyaa Raghavan’s journey into solving a few of the world’s hardest challenges began with a straightforward love for puzzles. By highschool, her knack for problem-solving naturally drew her to computer science. Through her participation in an entrepreneurship and leadership program, she built apps and twice made it to the semifinals of this system’s global competition.
Her early successes made a computer science profession seem to be an obvious alternative, but Raghavan says a big competing interest left her torn.
“Computer science sparks that puzzle-, problem-solving a part of my brain,” says Raghavan ’24, an Accenture Fellow and a PhD candidate in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. “But while I all the time felt like constructing mobile apps was a fun little hobby, it didn’t feel like I used to be directly solving societal challenges.”
Her perspective shifted when, as an MIT undergraduate, Raghavan participated in an Undergraduate Research Opportunity within the Photovoltaic Research Laboratory, now referred to as the Accelerated Materials Laboratory for Sustainability. There, she discovered how computational techniques like machine learning could optimize materials for solar panels — a direct application of her skills toward mitigating climate change.
“This lab had a really diverse group of individuals, some from a pc science background, some from a chemistry background, some who were hardcore engineers. All of them were communicating effectively and dealing toward one unified goal — constructing higher renewable energy systems,” Raghavan says. “It opened my eyes to the indisputable fact that I could use very technical tools that I enjoy constructing and find success in that by helping solve major climate challenges.”
Together with her sights set on applying machine learning and optimization to energy and climate, Raghavan joined Cathy Wu’s lab when she began her PhD in 2023. The lab focuses on constructing more sustainable transportation systems, a field that resonated with Raghavan on account of its universal impact and its outsized role in climate change — transportation accounts for roughly 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.
“If we were to throw the entire intelligent systems we’re exploring into the transportation networks, by how much could we reduce emissions?” she asks, summarizing a core query of her research.
Wu, an associate professor within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, stresses the worth of Raghavan’s work.
“Transportation is a critical element of each the economy and climate change, so potential changes to transportation should be fastidiously studied,” Wu says. “Shreyaa’s research into smart congestion management is significant since it takes a data-driven approach so as to add rigor to the broader research supporting sustainability.”
Raghavan’s contributions have been recognized with the Accenture Fellowship, a cornerstone of the MIT-Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology.
As an Accenture Fellow, she is exploring the potential impact of technologies for avoiding stop-and-go traffic and its emissions, using systems reminiscent of networked autonomous vehicles and digital speed limits that adjust based on traffic conditions — solutions that might advance decarbonization within the transportation section at relatively low price and within the near term.
Raghavan says she appreciates the Accenture Fellowship not just for the support it provides, but additionally since it demonstrates industry involvement in sustainable transportation solutions.
“It’s necessary for the sphere of transportation, and in addition energy and climate as an entire, to synergize with all of the several stakeholders,” she says. “I feel it’s necessary for industry to be involved on this issue of incorporating smarter transportation systems to decarbonize transportation.”
Raghavan has also received a fellowship supporting her research from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
“I feel it’s really exciting that there’s interest from the policy side with the Department of Transportation and from the industry side with Accenture,” she says.
Raghavan believes that addressing climate change requires collaboration across disciplines. “I feel with climate change, nobody industry or field goes to resolve it by itself. It’s really got to be each field stepping up and attempting to make a difference,” she says. “I don’t think there’s any silver-bullet solution to this problem. It’s going to take many various solutions from different people, different angles, different disciplines.”
With that in mind, Raghavan has been very lively within the MIT Energy and Climate Club since joining about three years ago, which, she says, “was a extremely cool method to meet a lot of individuals who were working toward the identical goal, the identical climate goals, the identical passions, but from completely different angles.”
This yr, Raghavan is on the community and education team, which works to construct the community at MIT that’s working on climate and energy issues. As a part of that work, Raghavan is launching a mentorship program for undergraduates, pairing them with graduate students who help the undergrads develop ideas about how they will work on climate using their unique expertise.
“I didn’t foresee myself using my computer science skills in energy and climate,” Raghavan says, “so I actually need to present other students a transparent pathway, or a transparent sense of how they will become involved.”
Raghavan has embraced her area of study even by way of where she likes to think.
“I like working on trains, on buses, on airplanes,” she says. “It’s really fun to be in transit and dealing on transportation problems.”
Anticipating a visit to Recent York to go to a cousin, she holds no dread for the long train trip.
“I do know I’m going to do a few of my best work during those hours,” she says. “4 hours there. 4 hours back.”
