Interview with Dr. Vivek Srikrishnan of Cornell

arjunkapur

December 24, 2023

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This summer I had the opportunity to attend a 2-week camp focused on environmental topics at Cornell University. As I was reading more about Cornell and their environmental-related programs, I came across Dr. Srikrishnan, who is an Assistant Professor at Cornell in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering. 

I wanted to understand Dr. Srikrishnan’s journey and how he eventually decided to be a professor. I was privileged to be able to speak to him while at Cornell, to understand their journey. Dr. Srikrishnan earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Energy & Mineral Engineering from Penn State, a B.S. in Mathematics, and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Below is a summary of my interview with Dr. Srikrishnan. 

Question 1: As a student, what initiated your interest in the environment and how did those parts drive you to study environmental engineering leading up?

So I don’t know that I would say that I was specifically interested in the environment per se; my original background is in mathematics. When I was in grad school, I began to think about whether I should be doing something more applied. This eventually led me to begin thinking and focusing on solar energy while specifically considering the uncertainty side. When it comes to climate change there is uncertainty in every aspect of it, there is uncertainty about the climate response to emissions and the emissions themselves. It is an interesting problem from the perspective of uncertainty because of how you make projections and understand the impact of policies when you have all these uncertain factors. The other side of it is how uncertainty is held up by climate change skeptics [defined as one with unwarranted doubt about the scientific consensus on the rate and extent of global warming, its significance, or its connection to human behavior, in whole or in part], but the reality is that it presupposes that there is a symmetry that the upside is the same as the downside of an action which is not the case. In other words, there is not a lot of upside where there is a lot of downside. So I was initially drawn to this level of complexity 

Question 2: When deciding what to study, did you ever consider energy as a whole, a different energy source, or was solar what you decided would give you the level of complexity that you found interest in? 

My PhD is in energy and mineral engineering and I focused mainly on solar energy in my research however it was more specifically on solar resource assessment rather than the solar cell aspect. With all of this, I still have a background in solar grid management. 

Question 3: How would you combat the problem of Solar Energy being not widespread enough due to various factors such as cost?

The production of solar cells is generally quite cheap and I don’t think that it would be a difficult thing to subsidize and a lot of states do. The means of subsidization, things like tax credits, are in favor of those with the resources to pay upfront versus direct sub. The other thing is that solar cells don’t have to be distributed to where everybody has them on their rooftops, you can do larger-scale installations which are on the utility-scale that then would allow them to be part of the normal grid. This allows there to not be replacement needed 

Question 4: What most inspires and excites you about your current research projects?

So like I said, I am very interested in complexity, especially decision-making under lots of uncertainties, uncertain dynamics, and uncertain impacts of policies, which I think is a very intellectually interesting area. There is a lot of reductionism [the practice of analyzing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of phenomena that are held to represent a simpler or more fundamental level, especially when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation.], at times, which is as a result of the societal demand for papers that make strong claims. I think that this can sometimes be dangerous and this makes me very interested in how that uncertainty can or should temper it. For example, are the models we are using biased in some way and what are the implications of that and how would we even know? So if you are making conclusions about certain policy pathways on what basis are you making that claim?; are they representative? are you neglecting feedback that would make it so that the policies would be more or less resilient than you were led to believe? I think that these are very important for decision making and we often don’t fully consider them. Partially because it is hard, not that people are just not doing it, but that it is a challenging problem. 

Question 5: Who will benefit most from your research? What will be the biggest impact they will have?

Since my work is more on the uncertainty side it is aimed more at researchers and policymakers who have to navigate the body of research so how can you contextualize different studies that then help you translate them into policies. Studies are often very hyper-focused on specific models; you have to build that together into a body of literature that could hypothetically show you how a study in California could translate to a study in New York, for example. It could be clearer because there are lots of differences, so I think that is where my research is aimed. My work is not revolutionary in terms of benefiting people, but more so revolutionizes the way that we approach something and hopefully builds a set of tools that allow us to understand the scope of the problem and solutions. 

Question 6: What is your role at Cornell, and can you walk us through the responsibilities of that role?

I teach classes on Systems Analysis and I do research as well. A system is a set of interconnected components where the connections between the components materially affect the dynamics. Something that is a system, you can’t just understand it as a sum of its parts, there is something more complex doing that could be their feedback loops that for example could make outcomes more or less aggressive than you would have predicted if you had just thought about components one at a time. It could be that other nonlinear shifts could occur that make it harder to predict or make the dynamic sensitive to the current state of the system. So as a systems engineer, you think about how you understand, simulate, and make decisions depending on the type of system. The overarching behavior of the system but not just focusing on one component. 

Question 7: How are students contributing to your research projects? 

Grad students do the bulk of the work, I do very little research day to day just because there isn’t enough time. There are also a couple of undergrads who work with me and do more minor tasks. Part of that is that the primary job of grad students is research and learning how to do research which is different from the primary focus of undergrads. Undergrads do smaller supportive tasks such as data collection, basic data analysis, and possibly helping to produce figures, but sort of smaller tasks that will aid the research around their classes. Grad Students, should put aside class work if it is getting in the way of research.  

This ended my conversation with Dr. Srikrishnan. 

This interview taught me that passion, intellectual curiosity toward a subject, and a strong mathematical background are very helpful when looking at solving problems related to environmental issues. Dr. Srikirshnan’s passion came through when he began talking about the uncertainty and unpredictability of climate change and I could see how much that interested him. 

I also was fascinated when he connected potential solutions to energy and government policies along with various methods of possible implementation. For me, this also means that I need to continue to read broadly and look at an issue from multiple perspectives to understand the whole context. 

Overall, I am grateful to Dr. Srikrishnan for being generous with his time, and I will continue my efforts to strengthen my understanding of the environment. 

-Arjun

https://www.cee.cornell.edu/faculty-directory/vivek-srikrishnan