The path to sustainable innovation through collaboration and community
In this episode of the Imagine A World podcast, Max Du (2024 cohort) talks with Sreya Vangara (2023 cohort), a third-year PhD student in mechanical engineering. Sreya shares her journey from empowering young women in STEM in Maryland to providing educational opportunities and sustainable solutions around the globe, including work in Madagascar, the Navajo Nation, and Guyana. As she pivots from high-tech environments, like nuclear fusion, to tackling energy access through innovative battery technologies and AI, Sreya emphasizes her belief in the power of education and collaboration. She imagines a world where cutting-edge technologies are accessible to marginalized communities, allowing them to create solutions that benefit their local contexts.
Resources
- SLAC-Stanford Batter Center
- Sreya's paper on SpectraQuery
- How Imagine A World began
Guest
Sreya Vangara, from Germantown, Maryland, is pursuing a PhD in mechanical engineering at Stanford School of Engineering. She graduated from MIT with a double major in mechanical and electrical engineering and computer science, and also earned a master’s in global affairs from Tsinghua University. Inspired by her Indian grandmother’s experience living without electricity, Sreya hopes to develop lower-cost nuclear fusion devices for consistent and clean power in emerging countries. Her research also elevates underprivileged communities through global clean water collaborations with Madagascar and the Navajo Nation.
Sreya supports sustainable innovation through grassroots educational initiatives, and has taught students in Kazakhstan, Mexico, Hong Kong, China, Palestine, and Israel. She is a recipient of a Schwarzman Scholarship, a Quad Fellowship, an National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and an MIT Henry Ford II Scholar Award. Outside of academics, she is a nationally ranked collegiate shooter, advocate for collegiate disability rights, and crime-drama enthusiast.
Imagine A World team
Imagine A World's theme music was composed and recorded by Taylor Goss (2021 cohort). The podcast was originally conceived and led by Briana Mullen (2020 cohort), Taylor Goss, and Willie Thompson (2022 cohort), along with Daniel Gajardo (2020 cohort) and Jordan Conger (2020 cohort).
Knight-Hennessy scholars represent a vast array of cultures, perspectives, and experiences. While we as an organization are committed to elevating their voices, the views expressed are those of the scholars, and not necessarily those of KHS.
Full transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.
Sreya Vangara:
And I started working with marginalized communities and providing educational opportunities. I moved into water access. I worked in Madagascar. I worked in the Navajo Nation. I also worked in Puerto Rico. I worked with refugee camps in Turkey. And then I moved to nuclear. I worked on these fusion devices. And I realized that there's an undercurrent to all of these, even to the flood management in Guyana, which is that almost every one of these solutions needs a source of power.
Hi, my name is Sreya Vangara. I'm a third-year PhD in the mechanical engineering department at Stanford, and I'm also a class of 2023 at Knight-Hennessy Scholars. I currently work on developing machine learning and AI tools to enable greater access to energy materials for a cleaner and brighter future. I imagine a world where everyone is able to access the resources and educational opportunities in order to make their world better.
Sydney Hunt:
Welcome to The Imagine A World podcast from Knight-Hennessy Scholars. We are here to give you a glimpse into the Knight-Hennessy scholar community of graduate students, spanning all seven Stanford schools, including business, education, engineering, humanities, law, medicine, and sustainability. In each episode, we talk with scholars about the world they imagine and what they are doing to bring it to life.
Max Du:
Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Imagine A World. I'm Max, your host of this podcast episode. I'm here with Sreya, a third-year PhD in mechanical engineering and a 2023 Knight-Hennessy cohort. Today, we're going to hear all about her journey of many pivots, anywhere from the deep depths of nuclear fusion to diplomacy and what she's working on today in batteries and AI. You're not going to believe the different paths that she's been taking. It's going to be amazing. Please stick around. Sreya, before we talk about the world you imagine, let's talk about the world that you were born into.
Sreya Vangara:
Absolutely. So I come from the great state of Maryland. I grew up there. I went to high school in Maryland, and I was always interested in science and math from a very young age. But by the time I got to high school, I realized I was the only girl in almost all of my STEM classes. I joined the robotics team, also the only girl there. And so I started creating these classes for girls in my community at the local library to teach them robotic skills and science outside of these male-dominated environments.
And this gained quite a bit of traction. I actually ended up being able to work with one of my state senators, Chris Van Hollen, on developing greater funding opportunities and infrastructure for women in STEM education across my state. And this led me to realize that community service and supporting the public good went hand in hand with achieving greater strides in science and math and all of these incredible fields, because we can't create the leaps and discoveries we need in order to advance humanity without everyone being at the table.
I'm currently co-advised by Eric Darve, who is the Head of ICME at Stanford, the Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering, as well as Jagjit Nanda, who is the Head of the Battery Center at SLAC. And what we're really interested in is encapsulating the varied and deep and expansive knowledge of the battery ecosystem and making it accessible for everyone. Now, batteries are a very intriguing field. They work at so many levels of scientific depth and complexity. You have the extremely fundamental physics, even quantum physics. You take a step up to chemistry and physical chemistry. Then, the material science, you're looking at entire swaths of materials.
You can move all the way up to computational, the computer science. You can even go to the systems level. There's MBAs who are looking at how entire battery systems work together that maybe power a city or a town or an entire community. And batteries have been around for a very long time, but the fundamental materials we make batteries of have been around for even longer. And batteries are extremely crucial and highly, highly studied topics all around the world. And so one can imagine that if you're trying to enter this field or conduct experiments and you don't have the opportunity or the privilege to be at the center or an epicenter of one of these great domains of battery knowledge, it's very difficult to determine how one even begins designing a battery, how one even starts the process or the journey of becoming a battery science, of developing a new technology for those you work with and those you care about.
And this is somewhere I think AI is really going to be a game changer and really going to be an equalizer. Our idea is we're going to use AI and LLMs to take this extremely diverse and distributed scale of battery knowledge all across the internet, all across academia, and distill it down into something that is easily searchable by anyone, that's easily searchable just by typing in a quick question. And it's going to be able to be distilled in a way that makes sense to people from all different levels of knowledge and experience. We're going to be able to allow you to put in experiments you've done, data you have, any sort of hypotheses and bring together this data as well as this academic knowledge to give you suggestions on how to close this engineering design loop, how to improve your next step of experiments, how to improve your next step of designs.
This is something that typically takes an entire team of scientists, each with a different position, each with a different expertise and a level of resources that is almost unheard of outside of a few places on the planet, and bring it into a team of AI agents that is going to be able to recreate that ecosystem for people who are developing new battery labs and new battery engineering in areas that don't have these opportunities. And so when I look at AI as an equalizer, I think about AI taking the opportunities and ecosystem I have access to at Stanford as a PhD student here and giving that to PhD students around the world who don't have the same environment. Giving that to researchers around the world who don't have that. Even people who aren't scientists, who don't have a background in engineering, who might see batteries as a solution for problems in their community, who might see batteries as a stepping stone to elevate the abilities and the functionalities of their societies, but don't have an area to get started in.
And so I'm extremely passionate and very optimistic about how AI can bring high-level scientific development and processes and discoveries to low-level environments, which really to me completes that loop of how do we bring high-level solutions to low-level environments? Well, now we don't have to hand-in-hand collaborate and develop these solutions. We can actually enable communities to create them on their own because we're connecting the gaps and filling in any sort of disparities and privilege and resources with AI. I think it's amazing. I think it's truly going to bring in a new world of discoveries and innovation from all around the globe. And I'm thrilled to see how the scientific world is about to just absolutely explode with innovation being made from places that have historically not had the platform from which to do so.
Max Du:
There's so much there to talk about. I was thinking about some of the stuff you were saying about growing up in this very weirdly male-dominated sort of STEM area. And a lot of people, they kind of notice that and they just don't do anything about it. But you took a step and you started teaching classes, which is actually a very distinctive thing. I've actually never heard anyone doing that. And I'm very curious about what got you from the realization to the actual execution of the classes.
Sreya Vangara:
Absolutely. I think teaching is a gift. I think that there are few greater feelings in life than seeing someone's face light up with recognition and understanding and knowing that you've broadened their minds. I really believe that in order to elevate the future, we must provide educational opportunities to everyone. And so I was so moved by my work in my county, I actually started bringing that same ethos and prerogative abroad. I went to Kazakhstan, which is a very far distance away from home. And I started teaching robotics classes in schools around that country. And I was working in Almaty. I was working in Astana with an NGO there, and I was helping teach young girls as well as students from different ethnic minorities across the country how to create something tangible and in moving with their own hands.
And to me, that's what really sparks the joy and lifelong curiosity in young people is being able to see a product from their imagination out in the real world. I took this same mindset to Hong Kong where I taught students about air pollution. I taught students about basic science and chemistry. And when I realized that being in the classroom wasn't piquing interest, it just wasn't really inspiring the way I wanted to, I got permission from the local government to launch a weather balloon with satellite payloads of sensors that my students had made. So I tasked them for a few weeks to put together these CO2 sensors, these oxygen on different kinds of pollutants, nitrogen, and they were very curious and honestly a little hesitant to work on these projects because they didn't see the bigger picture.
But once we launched and they were able to track the air patterns and the pollution patterns across their entire home and map this vision of the sky from standing on the ground, I saw this light bulb flash in their heads, realizing that by connecting the science, they were able to start making observations and goals about something much larger than themselves. They were able to really touch their environment and understand what it was they could do to help their community on a larger scale, on a higher platform they might have not been able to imagine before.
Max Du:
That like one moment when they saw that everything was not just the technological side, it was also more broader, right?
Sreya Vangara:
Oh, absolutely. I think being able to connect with your environment and your larger community is instrumental. It reminds young people what the power of the future holds and how much they can have an impact on if they really put themselves to these problems.
Max Du:
So working backwards a little bit here, you sound like you have so many experiences from all across the world, and yet you come from a pretty, I would assume, like small town area where you're kind of doing your own grassroots effort. And I'm very curious what got you from teaching classes at your local library to teaching across the world and inspiring all these people.
Sreya Vangara:
Yeah. Part of it was this desire to really understand the world, that we're all citizens. Oh, I think it's easy when you grow up in America to think that the world ends at our borders. And I was really moved and deeply curious to understand how the rest of the world understood this concept of global citizenship, because from an environmental perspective, we all share the same planet and we all need to be aligned in how we are motivated to make change and make improvements. And even within the U.S., for instance, one of my civic engagements that really touched me very deeply was I was working with an NGO in the Navajo Nation, which is an indigenous reservation in the contiguous United States in the southwest. And this is an indigenous community that has been deeply, deeply affected by heavy metal pollutants in their land, partially from American strip mining for uranium, partially from other mining endeavors.
And the water that flows in the rivers, the water that flows in wells is often just too contaminated to drink. And I was working with this NGO called Dig Deep out in the desert in Arizona, and we were trying to determine how to bring clean water to the people who lived in the middle of the desert and very far from most other civilizations. And our conclusion was we should dig for water. And so I'm out here, it's over a hundred degrees in the blistering sun. I usually never sunburn, and I can feel myself starting to sizzle, and I've got a shovel and I'm pressing it in this deeply packed desert soil that has not been moved out of place in probably centuries, trying to go deep enough to hit a well. And I'm thinking, "Is this the best way to help people?" I mean, we've been digging for water probably for millennia, probably for almost as long as humans have existed on this Earth.
At the time, I was also doing research at the Toyota AI Labs on self-driving cars. And so there was this clear dichotomy between my daily work of extremely high tech, cutting-edge computer science, and digging in the desert soil for water. And I had this epiphany in the middle of the desert that if we only bring low-level solutions to low-level communities, then we're never elevating people beyond what they currently have. If I am able to work with and develop the self-driving cars you see on the road nowadays, then the best I can do is not digging a hole. The best I can do is bring the forefront of the future to people who are often left out of that conversation.
Max Du:
And before we dive into that, real quick, just for logistics because I'm so curious, you've been all over the place. Can you give us a timeline? You started in high school, and then you went to college. Where did you go to college?
Sreya Vangara:
I went to MIT for college. I lived in Boston. I studied computer science and electrical engineering and mechanical engineering.
Max Du:
So I want to go to that insight that you had about bringing high technology to these communities. What does that look like in your mind?
Sreya Vangara:
Yeah, I think it looks like making cutting-edge technology accessible to everyone, not just those who live in developed countries, not just those who are as fortunate as we are to be around and part of a educational community like Stanford. It means taking a definitive and purposeful step away from these areas of privilege that we're often surrounded by and bringing our knowledge and our visions to communities that are often separated from this. So I'll give an example. After this epiphany in the burning hot deserts of the Navajo Nation, I did some work for an NGO in the south of Madagascar, and these were coastal villages that had very few sources of clean water. The above-ground lakes had dried out, the groundwater wells were disappearing. And although there was this absolute plethora of water surrounding them, the ocean is just not drinkable because it's salt water.
And our original thought was, "Okay, maybe we can make some sort of very simple solar still, which is a desalination device that essentially uses the sun's rays and the sun's heat to pull the salt out of the water and create drinking water. And our original prototype of this was very, very, very low efficiency, but it was extremely cheap. And we thought, "Yay, we nailed the requirements for this project. Let's move on." But who are the requirements for? Who sets the goals for these kinds of development engineering projects? It's usually not the people who are using them. It's usually the organization that runs them. It's usually the people that come in from outside, and so we pivoted and we started talking to the woman in the village who are the ones that operate these community water resources.
We asked them, "What do you need in order to raise your children, in order to support your family?" And we asked them, "What do you have access to currently?" And our next step, and this might sound interesting, is that we started collecting trash on the side of the road in Madagascar. We started collecting plastic bottles and jugs and old bicycle parts and things that people would just throw on the side of the road, on the side of the walkways, and we cataloged it to figure out what where the most common sources of different materials that we could find in these sorts of communities in trash heaps and in refuse.
And we realized that there was a particular kind of UN-issued water jug that was extremely common. It was almost ubiquitous across the southern region of Madagascar. And then we went and consulted with a lab at MIT with actually the woman who was the head of ARPA-E at that time. We went and consulted with Evelyn Wang and asked her, "You've done a lot of incredible work on extremely high-efficiency water purification. We want to take some of your designs that have been published in Nature, that have been lauded at extremely high levels, and make them with trash." And her lab was extremely excited to help us.
And so we connected this absolutely brilliant high-tech lab with our team that was dumpster diving in Madagascar and developed an intermediary device that was built out of trash, but that operated at an order of magnitude efficiency graded in our original prototype. We worked directly with local mechanic shops in Madagascar and actually learned skills from men who repaired bikes there that would be able to be propagated well past when our NGO left the area because they way that they fixed these devices was exactly the way that they were used to fixing bikes in the area.
Max Du:
Okay. That piques my curiosity so much. Can you explain to me what that system looks like and how it works?
Sreya Vangara:
Yes. So there are a few engineering challenges we face. I'll talk about the main two. The first was that this extremely high-level device that came out of the academic lab was built on the functionality of a particular type of aerogel material that was very costly to fabricate it and needed a nanofabrication lab. We tried to model its mechanical properties and then create an allegory of this material using a whole cacophony of materials we found from these trash piles all sandwiched together in different layers to try to recreate some of those material properties.
Max Du:
So this aerogel, what exactly is aerogel? Is it a filter? What does it look like and how does it serve its purpose in the-
Sreya Vangara:
Okay-
Max Du:
... sure.
Sreya Vangara:
... yes. So this aerogel material essentially enables the device to hold on to more thermal energy from the sun and propagate it through the system than the de facto design that humans have been using for a very, very long time. And so by doing a deep dive and delving truly into the fundamental science of this technology, we were able to attempt to build it back up using the materials we had at our disposal, but maintaining those key learnings and innovations that came out of this high-tech, cutting-edge lab. And to me, that's what really completes the circle. That's what enables us to bring high-level engineering to lower level communities that may not have the same privilege, is understanding the core of what drives this innovation and adapting it hand in hand with the people who are going to use it.
Max Du:
And when you were going in the field and introducing people to this new thing that you guys had built, what was the reaction by the local community?
Sreya Vangara:
Yeah, the local community was extremely impressed that we were able to repurpose these UN water jugs into something that seemed so sleek and professional, but really the final reaction was not surprised because they had been with us every step of the way. They had seen it when we were first trying to figure out how to collect garbage. And then they saw it when we were cutting up the garbage into different samples. They were with us when we were testing the material properties of all of these different components. They were there when we first turned on the system and saw water dripping out. They were there when we were measuring the qualities of the water and determining if it was drinkable property or not.
And so I think the idea of bringing in something brand new to an ecosystem, to an community, we often want that astonishment. We often want that gasp of surprise to know that we've done something novel, but the novelty lies in cooperation and collaboration. So I think when you don't have those gasps of surprise, you know that the people who are intended to use this feel familiar and feel confident enough to repair it when it's broken, feel confident enough to try to improve upon the system even if the NGO engineers leave.
Max Du:
Yeah. It's like this idea that you're not coming in there introducing some magical thing and you kind of leave. It's more like you engage with the community, and as you engage, you kind of co-create this whole thing that will continue to benefit that community.
Sreya Vangara:
Yeah.
Max Du:
And what stood out to me about this story is the decision to observe, not just to come in and make something and leave, but you went through the trash and also you started talking to people who have lived there for a long time. I think that that might be something that people don't keep in mind as much when it comes to building projects like that.
Sreya Vangara:
Well, something that inspired me about this was how effectively we were able to move from a lab at MIT to on the ground in villages in Madagascar. And that inspired me to think, "Where can I go next? What is a technology or a domain of science that is just so out there and almost intangible that I can maybe imagine in my future bringing to communities around the world?" And to my mind at that time, it was nuclear fusion. And so I pivoted my field. I pivoted my career and I joined Commonwealth Fusion Systems where I worked on developing, assembling, and testing the magnetic coils for their reactor. And so for a little bit of context, Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building one of the world's preeminent fusion devices, and this uses super magnetic coils that surround a plasma that will ideally bring us the same power that currently runs the sun.
Max Du:
And what makes fusion so hard?
Sreya Vangara:
Fusion is incredibly hard for a variety of reasons. A few are the incredible temperatures we have to reach and maintain the difficulty of containing a plasma, of containing the sun on earth, the difficulty of even creating the conditions that enable the beginning of fusion. And so when I joined Commonwealth and I started working on this almost science fiction kind of technology, I thought that my greatest challenges were going to be scientific. I thought I was going to be battling in Newton and Einstein and all of these equations and theorems and laws of thermodynamics every day.
I was soldering, I was writing code, I was conducting tests. I was putting an incredible amount of electricity into materials until they failed in cataclysmic ways, and I was working right next to what would hold a piece of the sun on Earth. And what ended up happening was one day I realized that we had a little less material to work with than the day before. And the next day we had even less experiments and this started to continue for a while. And at one of our all-hands meetings, I learned that this was because there was, at the time, somewhat of a trade dispute between China that produced the raw materials and processed materials that went into our reactor and Japan that refined those materials into higher level compounds that we then used to build the magnetic coils.
And so even though I was under the impression that I was fighting the sun, what I was really fighting was a cargo ship full of metals sitting in a port in China that would not go to Japan thousands of miles away from me and that science was being held up by geopolitics. And as a scientist, and you're a scientists as well, we never think that the greatest challenges to our field like outside the lab. We always think that if you shut us in our laboratory with enough resources and enough chemicals and enough beakers, we'll transmute gold at the end of the day. We never think that our biggest challenges are thousands of miles away because people arguing over something that doesn't matter to us, but is now affecting our ability to push the boundaries of human knowledge.
And so I remember sitting next to this reactor in the process of being built and knowing that what was preventing us from making progress, from powering the world off of the power of the sun, was a trade dispute. And I did tell you everything there was to know about the physics and the chemistry and the material science of fusion and what I was working on, but I couldn't tell you a single thing about treaties and diplomacy and international law. And I realized that in order to be a scientist in this day and age, it wasn't enough to be able to do the math. You had to go out there and understand the world.
Max Du:
So that was a surprising moment for you when you realized that the stuff you're doing in the lab was affected by everything else around you, right?
Sreya Vangara:
Yeah. No, it was an absolute shock to me. It really drove that humility that scientists often need to rediscover within themselves that the world is greater than what seems to be world-consuming problems that are on your desk. And in order to broaden my horizons and develop the toolkit for a future in these extremely cutting-edge, yet globally dependent scientific fields, I decided I am going to go learn diplomacy. I'm going to learn about why this cargo ship full of the metal I want isn't moving across the ocean to me. And I took another pivot and enrolled in a master's program at Tsinghua University studying global affairs, where I read books on world history, where I heard from scholars in the field, from diplomats, from ambassadors. And I ended up doing a bit of work of research with the economists in Beijing learning about supply chains.
And it was incredible to be in another environment that was so orthogonal to what I was used to in the United States, being in China, which is a technological powerhouse, which is an absolutely incredible place to be assigned as an observing credible science. But what moved me the most was realizing that no matter where I went in the world, no matter how different governments might be from my own, nor how far they may be from where I live, and people are the same everywhere. People all want the same, and that's a better life from those who come after them. There's a little funny story here where in China, they have what's called the Gaokao which one can think of as the SAT, but really it's a far more important, all-determining exam that students take in high school. It really determines their college and a lot of the future trajectory of their life.
And I was chatting at the train station with this kid who was maybe 11 or 12, and he was very excited to show me, who was clearly a foreigner, his Gaokao study books. And he was flipping through them and showing me the little drawings he made on the side of the margins and the questions that he was really struggling to figure out the answers for. This was the English Gaokao. And I was happily giving him a little bit of help because I was enjoying interacting with this child, and his father noticed us. And he was so excited that his child had found a native English speaker, he immediately gave me his first-class ticket on the train and said, "You sit next to my son and keep chatting with him, help him out on this exam. And I will take your back-of-the-train third-class ticket and sit where you're supposed to sit. Please, please, please, please, here are a bunch of snacks on me, enjoy your time."
And I kept in touch with that kid for a very long time. I helped him write the English for his social media posts and all the places his family went on vacation. It was absolutely incredible. But at the time, I was spending so much energy and time learning about the differences in different political circles and infrastructures and U.S. trade and China trade, and everything in the world broke down into one ecosystem or another. And it was just incredible to be reminded that everyone wants a better future. And even though several years prior to that, I was sitting at my desk cursing about this shipful of metal I wanted that was sitting in a Chinese port and not moving towards me. Now that I was in China, it was truly heartwarming to realize that everywhere I went, there was this drive to see a brighter future and sacrifice for that brighter future and sacrifice for those who come after us. And it gave me so much motivation to continue going down the path I was on.
Max Du:
That's what strikes me about the little story you told about the boy and his Gaokao, the English Gaokao, is that his dad was also so willing to sacrifice his first-class ticket so that he could be with a native English speaker, just like how we all want to improve our own living condition because it is true. I mean, the Gaokao is like if you score high on it, it's your ticket out of wherever you kind of grew up, right?
Sreya Vangara:
Exactly.
Max Du:
So that's huge. But the thing that also sticks out to me about this particular pivot, because your previous pivots have been it's all of technology, there's just different aspects of it that you're kind of pivoting into. This is like a huge pivot, right? You went from being very technically driven in this really high-tech fusion lab to going across the ocean and studying diplomacy. When you made that pivot, did you think you'd have regrets? Did you have like second thoughts while you were making it?
Sreya Vangara:
I thought that if I didn't try this now, then I might regret it later because there's a quote I love. And this was told to me by just a man I was in line in front of at some point in my life. I don't know if we were waiting on the coffee. I don't know if we were waiting at an Olive Garden, but he told me, "Life is too long to not get more education." And I think that's incredible because everyone always tells you life is too short, but really I could be a scientist forever and I could keep learning more and more science, or I could try to broaden my horizons and learn something new and see the world from another perspective. And while I was in China, at the time I was in China, there were very few visas or residence permits being offered to Americans or foreigners in general.
I think at the time I was one of maybe 200 to 300 Americans with a residence permit in China. So it was very, very rare to see a foreigner in China at the time. And I traveled around the whole country. I had an incredible experience. And most of the places I went, I was the only foreigner I would see for days on end, maybe even weeks. It instilled in me this responsibility to be an ambassador for my country. I represented the U.S. to everyone I met. I represented the U.S. to everyone I talked to. Even the kid on the train and his dad, to them, I was an embodiment of America, and how I behaved, how I acted, how I reached out and interacted with them would reflect not only on my country, but on how they perceive all of the people of my country.
And it gave me an enormous sense of pride to know that I could be a representative of something greater than myself, but also this intriguing notion that diplomacy might be something I enjoy. I really like talking to people. I liked trying to engage with folks who grew up extremely differently from myself, who lived very differently from myself and might have very different ideas on what the world looks like and what society should operate as. And this drove me to what I can only describe as a pivot perhaps into diplomacy. I did some work for the State Department in different areas. I was invited by the Biden White House to serve on a committee to advise the Department of Commerce on investments and critical minerals and climate change the year after. And I had an absolutely incredible time representing not just the United States, but the scientists and engineers, the academics of the United States in what are almost standard economic and trade conversations that usually scientists don't get to have a seat at.
It's very common that these decisions are made without the scientists at the table, and it was incredible to be able to represent as a scientist at the table. I worked on a project with the U.S. State Department in the country of Guyana, and Guyana is a small country on the Caribbean coast of South America. It has some of the most pristine Amazon rainforest in the world, absolutely beautiful. Gorgeous, gorgeous place, and almost the entire population of Guyana lives on the coast essentially underwater. And I went to Guyana to evaluate the dams and coker system that prevents these coastal planes from flooding at high tides and during storms, and to evaluate some sort of technological solution to their climate change issues.
Firstly, I was absolutely moved by how incredibly welcoming and accommodating and enthusiastic the Guyanese people were about their encroaching fight against climate change. I think it's easy when we live inland and when we live in places very sheltered by the effects, we think about resilience in the future and how we can change our actions to propagate long-term effects. But in Guyana, you can literally see the water going above the sand and realizing that if we didn't have any system in place, that would flood a significant amount of the community. And the way that their flood mitigation system works right now in a very distilled version is there are people stationed at intervals all along the coastline. And when they see the water is going up, they open these canal systems. And when the water is going down, they close the canal systems.
It's very manual and it's very difficult to maintain and coordinate. And I was saying that thinking like, "you know, whenever I have a question, when I need something to make a decision for me, I could think about it, I could ask Google." But you know what people do nowadays? They plug this into ChatGPT. If you need an opinion, we ask some sort of AI agent. We ask an LLM, so why are we having humans make these decisions, having to stay up all night and try to peer out into the darkness and make decisions that we could potentially alleviate the situation with AI? And I think we live in an environment and a society right now that looks at AI like almost a villain that is coming in and encroaching and is going to permanently shift our society to the worse. Unfortunately, AI is here regardless of whether we like it or not.
Max Du:
It's here to stay.
Sreya Vangara:
It's here to stay, and we can continue being mad at it, or we can try to discern how it can improve not only our lives, but the lives of other people around the world. And I think AI can be a great equalizer because the proposal we worked with the Guyanese government with officials from Guyana and actually students from Guyana to submit to the government was let's implement AI sensors across this flood mitigation system of Guyana to, one, not only alleviate people what is a very, very difficult job, but two, to ensure that flooding is mitigated, that the communities and houses face less environmental damage and are able to maintain more resiliency for the future. And so coming out of that project, coming out of that collaboration, I was left with this lingering impression that I've been searching for how we bring high-level technology to communities that don't have the privileges and the opportunities that we have here at Stanford, here at MIT, even here in the United States.
And a large part of that comes from a knowledge gap. It comes from a gap in literature, in academia, in scientific logs and engineering cycles across a long period of time. Can AI actually help us bring that level of scientific development and knowledge to communities that don't have access to it right now?
Max Du:
That's exactly what I was thinking about as you was telling the story is like it feels like another amazing example of how bringing cutting-edge technology to these communities had the most impact. Bringing the AI sensors would allow people to not just stare at the ocean continuously and decide to open a floodgate.
Sreya Vangara:
Yeah. No, absolutely, and that brings me actually to the work that I'm doing here for my PhD. I think that AI and LLMs are an extremely effective tool to help us bring the design of cutting-edge technology to communities that don't have the resources to necessarily do all that experimentation themselves, but would like to engage in the current realm and the current field of creating new energy and new sustainability innovations for the future. So my primary work is on batteries and energy technologies. I'm based between SLAC National Laboratory and Stanford, and I work on harnessing the incredible amount of experimental data and knowledge and conclusions we're able to draw from the resources we have at Stanford and this national lab to becoming something intuitive and parsable and understandable by the general public using AI and using LLM tools.
And my goal is to eventually develop a platform where anyone, not just someone from one of these labs, anyone can use these AI-based tools to design batteries that fit their particular use cases. Maybe you're a small community in coastal Madagascar and you now have a water desalination plant to provide free drinking water for your village, but you need some sort of stationary power bank for it. You don't necessarily have the funding to hire an outside team to design that. Maybe you can use my AI tool now to select a battery and design a system that best fulfills your requirements.
Maybe you're a small community in the Navajo Nation and you live in the desert and you are trying to set up a hospital and you want a stationary power system, and you need batteries to power that. You don't necessarily have the funding to bring in an outside team, but maybe you can use this AI tool to design a system that now supports your local community and fulfills the requirements you need. Maybe the school in Kazakhstan, maybe your school in Hong Kong, I can imagine that the tools that I'm working on and my hope is that they're not only used by other people in my field, but they're able to be used by people all around the world with varying degrees of opportunity and resources because the knowledge is now brought to their fingertips. The knowledge is encapsulated in a way that gives them a generational privilege of research accumulation that we have in environments like Stanford.
Max Du:
Right. And in that way, AI is an equalizer in your application.
Sreya Vangara:
Exactly.
Max Du:
And one of the things I am curious about is why batteries? There's a lot of other technologies that can also be equalized in that way through AI, right?
Sreya Vangara:
Absolutely. So this is a really great question and something I thought a lot about on my journey through my career. I started on education. I started working with marginalized communities. I'm providing educational opportunities. I moved into water access. I worked in Madagascar. I worked in the Navajo Nation. I also worked in Puerto Rico. I worked with refugee camps in Turkey, and then I moved to nuclear. I worked on these fusion devices, and I realized that there's an undercurrent to all of these, even to the flood management in Guyana, which is that almost every one of these solutions needs a source of power. A water purification device will stand alone unless it has some sort of power to make it run. A school needs lights. Flood management systems need power to operate the movement of these canal coker systems. They need power to run these AI sensors.
So much of access to basic human needs relies on access to power and electricity. And so from my perspective, fundamental to all of that is access to electricity. I started in nuclear. I thought, "Okay, this is amazing, but the time horizons are a little too broad for me." Batteries are an undercurrent to all of renewable energy. And so that led me into this battery space because you can imagine if you have solar energy, batteries enable that to be on demand. Wind energy batteries enable that to be on demand and so on. Almost oh so much of the developing world is building on renewables right now. It's absolutely incredible to look at. It's extremely inspirational, but having power storage is equally important in order to make those energy systems usable.
Max Du:
And looking back on all this, I mean, the journeys that you made in both the sciences and the diplomacy and everything, do you feel like what you're doing right now is a culmination of all of that? Or do you feel like you're still part of this long and amazing journey?
Sreya Vangara:
I think it's still a part of a journey. I think we're always on a journey, whether or not we realize that I think life is a journey. I think that batteries are absolutely incredible. I'm thrilled to be part of the battery ecosystem, battery field for my PhD. It's an amazing field full of extremely smart and talented people, but the undercurrent to my motivation towards my PhD, as well as my motivation throughout my life, is just this true intrinsic desire to help others, to bring to others the resources and the platform required for them to then turn around and make a difference in their communities. I think that the world is extremely large and it's very important to me that we all understand how large the world is. I'm a huge traveler. My guilty pleasure is traveling. I've been to probably 55 countries so far and still counting.
And one of my most fond memories is I was in Iceland and I was standing on the South Coast and it was an extremely windy, extremely cold day. There was a blizzard coming in. I was almost getting blown away by the wind in my big puffy coat. I was almost like a sail and I was looking out into the ocean and these enormous waves, I mean, absolutely enormous, something like from Interstellar, were pummeling the coast. Just absolutely fighting the rocky cliffs of the coast. And every time they hit, it felt like an earthquake went through the ground and I felt the ground shake, and I wasn't sure we were going to make it for the next wave. And then the next wave came and the ground shook again. And I looked out into the ocean and I thought, "I would believe the ancient gods walked out of this ocean."
I mean, I could never fight this water. I can travel all around the world. I can work on bringing the sun to Earth. I can work in countries as far as from each other as possible, but at the end of the day, I am nothing against Mother Nature, and we are all nothing against Mother Nature. The waves will keep coming well after we're gone and the waves were there before we were here. And I think it's important for us to not just support nature, but to be like nature as well, to continue trying, to continue growing, to continue looking. I don't think there's ever a true ending to our development, both as people, but also as citizens of society. And I think it's our responsibility to continue looking for ways to uplift the community and really push the future forward.
Max Du:
To be like nature, relentless and beautiful at the same time.
Sreya Vangara:
[inaudible 00:51:44].
Max Du:
But still, I can see the waves in my mind, just giant waves and you standing out at the edge of nature. I feel like when you're standing in nature, it's just you kind of realize how small you are, but at the same time, how full we are as people. And I think about even like when I think about your journey and how it started as being only women in STEM and also in your journey in diplomacy being one of the only few Americans in China. And what I reflect on is I think about how you're able to bring whatever thing is exceptional about you in that moment to the rest of everyone else.
Sreya Vangara:
No, you're extremely flattering.
Max Du:
No-
Sreya Vangara:
[inaudible 00:52:25].
Max Du:
... that is just a reflection of what I'm thinking when I think about your story and your many pivots. When people have pivots like that, they oftentimes have a through line, things that continue to haunt them. And that's one of the things that I've noticed about your story.
Sreya Vangara:
I absolutely love about being in diplomacy and being in scientific communications and this kind of collaborative scientific ecosystem is that there are always people who can inspire you. There are always people who motivate you to look at problems in a different way, to see problems that you didn't think were there. I'm fundamentally a computer scientist and a computationalist, and I work with a lot of material scientists, and they've shown me the beauty in a crystal lattice, the beauty in fundamental laws of chemistry and understanding exactly how atoms stack up to make the world around us, all the ways they can stack up all of the constraints and limitations and how we can predict exactly where these atoms will fall and what they'll do. Which is something that is almost Ancient Greek to me to understand. I think part of being in diplomacy and seeing how communities dream and build and inspire around the world inspires me to come back to Stanford, to come back to Knight-Hennessy and continue that legacy of dreaming, to continue that legacy of collaboration and conjoining in effort.
Something's that incredible about Knight-Hennessy that really motivated me to become a part of this community that I continue to love to this day is how different everybody is. I know we have that undercurrent, that through line of our core tenets of the program, but every single person you meet here, the least interesting thing about them is that they're in Knight-Hennessy. They're so incredible. They have a wealth of experiences and knowledge and just novels of life that they've lived, and talking to every person, you realize that there is an entire world they are passionate about. They could fill the globe up with solutions they want to implement and communities they want to help and global problems they want to solve. And I think part of the responsibility of being part in this community is that I connect with others and say, "Hey, here is a problem you want to solve. This is a problem I want to solve. I think they actually connect. I think we can hold our hands out and join them and solve them together. Would you be interested in that?"
And so it's been amazing, I'm a third-year now, so this is technically my last year of being part of the program. I'm incredibly sad to not be a full member anymore, but I'm overjoyed with thinking about the people that I've had the opportunity to meet, with thinking about the incredible impact that the folks from this community are going to make on the world. And it just makes me more excited to see where the next chapter of my life is going to go.
Max Du:
And that's so beautiful to see all the diversity in this community and to get along in your own ways with everybody that kind of comes into your life because of Knight-Hennessy and the grad program, too. And so we're going to leave it at that. It's absolutely amazing. It's been an amazing hour sitting here and talking with you. I've learned so much about everything in these pivots in your journey, but also I've had this greater appreciation for the things that tie together subjects that people tend not to think as connected. And I think that that's a lesson that we can all take away from this wonderful journey of you. So thank you so much.
Sreya Vangara:
Thank you so much, Max. It's been an honor to be here with you and the team.
Sydney Hunt:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Imagine A World, where we hear from inspiring members of the KHS community who are making significant contributions in their respective fields, challenging the status quo, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible as they imagine the world they want to see.
Willie Thompson:
This podcast is sponsored by Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University, a multidisciplinary, multicultural graduate fellowship program, providing scholars with financial support to pursue graduate studies at Stanford, while helping equip them to be visionary, courageous, and collaborative leaders who address complex challenges facing the world. Follow us on social media, @knighthennessy, and visit our website at kh.stanford.edu to learn more about the program and our community.
