About me

Hi, I’m Jai. I am a civil/environmental engineer by education, but think of myself as just an engineer. I like solving science and engineering problems, whether it is by building something physical, by creating a computational model, or by writing code. I completed my undergraduate degree from Gandhi Institute of Technology in the beautiful coastal city of Visakhapatnam, India, where I studied the usual mix of civil engineering subjects (math, physics, structural engineering, transportation engineering, environmental engineering etc.). While in college, I was the city lead of a national non-profit organization “Make a Difference” where I managed a group of around 50 volunteers who taught English and communication/career-development skills to children in shelter homes.

I moved to the US in 2013, for a Master’s program at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, joining researchers at the Urban Water Group. At the group, I worked on a NASA-funded project to advance the understanding of urban impacts on precipitation processes and the water budget in mountain watersheds. As part of my work, I built machine learning models in the R language to study urban air quality effects on precipitation, snowpack, streamflow, and water system vulnerability.

Since graduating with a M.S. in 2015 I have worked for a specialized environmental consulting firm in Los Angeles, CA. My work mainly involves building hydraulic and hydrodynamic surface water models, dam breach and erosion modeling, water quality data management and analysis, and geospatial analysis and GIS. But I also get to do fun stuff like developing new water resources modeling software in Python and building machine learning models.

Interests

I’m excited by the applications of computational science in solving scientific and engineering problems, mainly in the areas of fluid mechanics, geosciences, climate science and engineering risk & reliabilty. I’m particularly interested in machine learning and high performance computing as applied to those areas. I code primarily in Python nowadays, but have also worked with R, Matlab, C and C++ in the past.

My interest areas include:

• Mesh development for fluid mechanics, geophysics and structural engineering
• Reduced-order modeling for fluid mechanics, especially using machine learning
• Computer vision applications
• Systems modeling and optimization
• Remote sensing and geospatial analytics
• Development of open-source data analysis and vizualization libraries