Dr. S. Karthik Mukkavilli
Group Head of AI, Mercuria · Adjunct Professor, KAIST
Google Scholar · karthikLab · Talks & appearances
Bio
Dr. S. Karthik Mukkavilli is Group Head of AI at Mercuria, reporting to the Co-Founder & CEO with strategic and operational responsibility for global AI leadership. Mercuria is a leading Swiss multinational commodity trading company (~$170B turnover), pledging 50% of new investments to the energy transition, including $1B in renewables and $500M+ in nature-based carbon. He leads AI scientists and engineers developing commodity trading signal-generation algorithms in the front office, and enterprise AI platform teams developing agents and LLMs for middle, back, and front-office analysis. He previously reported to the CIO as senior AI architect and principal scientist.
He is also Adjunct Professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), focusing on AI for complex systems and scientific machine learning at the Graduate School of Green Growth & Sustainability (GGGS). Prospective students → karthikLab.
He has 15 years of experience at the intersection of science, engineering, and AI, applying AI to complex systems across technology, government, non-profits, startups, and financial markets on four continents.
Previously at IBM Research – Zurich, he advanced generative AI for geospatial and climate applications, contributing to 300M+ parameter models integrated into Watsonx Granite, collaborating with a Fortune 50 energy major, and earning two NASA Group Achievement Awards for AI foundation models.
His ~4.7K citations include publications in Nature Machine Intelligence, AGU Earth’s Future, Nature Reviews Bioengineering, EMNLP, WSDM, KDD, IJCAI, and Nature Climate Change. He co-authored a highly cited ACM Computing Surveys ML-for-climate paper, contributed to the New York Times bestseller Drawdown, founded and chaired AI for Earth Sciences workshops at NeurIPS & ICLR, and served as senior reviewer at the Keeling Curve Prize. His coauthored research has appeared in MIT Tech Review, Forbes, Bloomberg, National Geographic, Le Devoir, Times of India, and Korean media.
He was previously a postdoc fellow mentored by Turing Laureate Yoshua Bengio (Mila) in deep learning, an AI postdoc visiting scholar at Berkeley Lab (DOE), and worked in robotics/RL with Gregory Dudek and David Meger (McGill). He holds a PhD in Scientific Computing (solar radiative transfer, atmospheric numerics) from UNSW as a CSIRO OCE doctoral scholar, an MSc in Process Systems Engineering from Imperial College London, and a BE(Hons.) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Auckland, NZ, with an exchange at UCLA.
Talks & appearances
Speaker portrait: AI + Environment Summit. Video previews: YouTube.