Charuleka Varadharajan

Biography

Charuleka Varadharajan, PhD, is a Research Affiliate and Research Mentor at ICSI, Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Research Affiliate at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. 

As a biogeochemist and environmental data scientist, Dr. Varadharajan’s research interests focus on the water, energy, and carbon nexus to understand and limit the impacts of human activities on water resources and climate. Dr. Varadharajan leads the Earth AI and data program in the Earth & Environmental Sciences Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her current work focuses on building an environmental knowledgebase including a scalable data archive capable of hosting vastly diverse datasets; data integration using a brokering approach; data QA/QC, processing, and analytics using a combination of statistical, data mining, and machine learning approaches; data assimilation tools for model-data integration; and interactive visualizations and narrative interfaces. Her expertise spans various techniques for data collection and analysis, including laboratory experiments; x-ray synchrotron spectroscopy; sensor-based field data collection; web-based software to integrate distributed datasets in real-time; and the use of geoinformatics, statistical, and wavelet-based data processing to analyze high spatial and temporal resolution data. 

Dr. Varadharajan’s previous areas of focus have included the fate, transport, and mitigation of contaminants in groundwater; measurement and prediction of carbon fluxes in terrestrial and subsurface environments; and management, synthesis, and analysis of diverse multi-scale environmental datasets. She also participated in data-driven scientific assessments of well stimulation (hydraulic fracturing) in California performed for federal and state agencies and was part of an expert committee advising the state of California on criteria for monitoring groundwater impacted by well stimulation. Dr. Varadharaja earned her PhD in civil and environmental engineering from MIT.

Publications

Selected Honors & Awards

• DOE Early Career award
• Berkeley Lab Director’s Award for Exceptional Early Career Scientific Achievement in the Area of Data Science for Earth and Environmental Science

ICSI Activity