Charuleka Varadharajan is a computational Earth scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she leads the Earth AI and data program. Her interdisciplinary expertise spans surface and groundwater hydrology, methane biogeochemistry, contaminant fate and transport, oil and gas applications, and carbon sequestration.
Varadharajan’s recent research includes pioneering machine learning (ML) methods for spatiotemporal predictions, large-scale integration of heterogeneous datasets, and development of open-science infrastructure including the U.S. DOE’s ESS-DIVE data repository. In 2019, she received the esteemed DOE Early Career Research Award for developing a data-driven framework, iNAIADS, to predict the impacts of natural hazards, such as heatwaves, droughts, and extreme rainfall, on river flows and water quality across the United States. Her leadership in major DOE projects includes advancing ML and data integration for the CATALOG program aimed at identifying undocumented orphaned wells in the U.S., and exploring drought resilience in mountain watersheds for the https://watershed.lbl.gov/ using hybrid ML and process-based models. Charu has served as a technical expert to the State of California on groundwater data reporting and criteria for monitoring groundwater impacted by well stimulation (hydraulic fracturing).
She holds a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from MIT and a postdoctoral fellowship at Berkeley Lab. Charu is also a principal investigator at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at UC Berkeley and a research affiliate with the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS).
Area of Interest
- Physical Geography and Environmental Geoscience
- Environmental Science and Management
- Soil Sciences
- Surfacewater Hydrology
- Water Resources Engineering
- Water Quality Engineering
- Knowledge Representation and Machine Learning
- Pattern Recognition and Data Mining
- Biogeochemistry
- Hydrology
- Data Management
- AI/Machine Learning
- Methane
Education
- Ph.D.|Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States|2009
- Master of Science|Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States|2004
- Bachelor of Technology|Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India|2001
