Spotlight: Aditi Sheshadri

I work to understand what sets climate on Earth and how it may be changing. I use fluid dynamics to learn about large-scale climate features like the jet stream, storm tracks, and the polar vortex.

As a kid, I was very much into space. I wanted to be an astronaut. I would spend time with a solar system simulator that used to be a NASA thing. There was this beautiful mashup of images from different missions to the giant planets and things like that. You could go on there and say you wanted to see Jupiter from one of its moons, like two weeks ago. 

Space propulsion was fascinating to me. I read a lot of science fiction – Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov were two of my particular favorites. I guess that’s how it all got started. My dad was also a professor of aerospace engineering, and I was particularly close with him.

I grew up in India, where, in general, if you’re doing really well in high school, you tend to either do engineering or medicine. There isn’t as much emphasis on basic science. So, I did mechanical engineering. 

I followed up on my interest in doing propulsion. I went to MIT to get a PhD in aerospace engineering – that was the plan. I did two years of that, but it wasn’t the best fit. The work started to seem kind of incremental. At that point, I got a job in a company in Southern California doing basically what I do now, which is computational fluid dynamics. But it was applied to engineering problems.

Then I saw an ad for a workshop at Caltech on energy flows in the climate system. I emailed the organizers and said, “I’m kind of a student, still. Can I just show up?” And they said, “Yes, absolutely!” 

I ended up going and I encountered a professor from MIT who convinced me that all of my background in mathematics, fluid dynamics, computation could be applied to the problem of climate and atmospheric flows. 

I applied to MIT again, and got into a very different program. I worked with a professor who was an expert in the stratosphere, and that somehow just felt right. Since then, my career has been pretty linear. Before I got this job at Stanford, I got a pretty good postdoctoral fellowship, which gave me the independence to do whatever I wanted. I was able to choose my own collaborators and work on something rather theoretical, which led to some intriguing results. 

Sheshadri is also a senior fellow, by courtesy, at Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Related: Aditi Sheshadri, Assistant Professor of Earth System Science