Chemical Engineering Seminar

Smruthi Karthikeyan is the Gordon and Carol Treweek Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering and a William H. Hurt Scholar in the EAS Division at Caltech. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of California San Diego-School of Medicine where she worked on developing techniques to provide a mechanistic understanding of microbial community dynamics in complex ecosystems. She obtained her PhD in in Environmental Engineering with a minor in Microbiology and Computational Biology from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2020. As a part of her PhD thesis in the she worked on developing integrated wet-lab and computational biology-based approaches to model, predict and forecast recovery patterns in ecosystems affected by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. She was a GoMRI (Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative) scholar from 2016-2019. She won the 2018 James D Watkins student award for excellence in research instituted by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and the ASM (American Society for Microbiology) Student award in 2019. She was selected as a 2019 MIT Rising Star in Civil and Environmental Engineering. She was also chosen as one of ten "Scientists to Watch" in Science News SN10 in 2022. Her research has been highlighted on CBS 60 minutes, TIME Magazine, Forbes, NBC Nightly News, Reuters, The New York Times, CNN, The Conversation, JAMA, Nature, Science, NIH, NSF Highlights amongst others.