S☀️karthik mukkavilli = prof. dr. k
Bio
S. Karthik Mukkavilli (Prof. Dr. k) has 15 years of experience at the intersection of science, engineering, and AI, working across technology, government, non-profits, startups and recently financial markets across four continents. He is currently the Group Head of AI at Mercuria reporting to the co-founder, CEO with responsibilities to guide AI leadership globally at a leading Swiss multinational energy commodity trading company, and operational responsibilities in technology development as senior AI architect and principal scientist. Mercuria generates ~$170bn in turnover, pledging 50 percent of new investments into energy transition with $1bn invested into renewables, net-zero and 500M+ being deployed into nature.
Dr. k was recently appointed as an Adjunct Professor at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). His group at KAIST will focus on AI for complex systems and scientific machine learning for climate, energy and Earth sciences in the Graduate School of Green Growth and Sustainability (GGGS) at KAIST. GGGS performs multi-disciplinary carbon neutrality research combining science and technology research with policy and finance. GGGS is part of the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium.
Previously, Dr. k was at IBM Research – Zurich, where he advanced generative AI-driven geospatial and climate innovations. His work recognised with IBMs outstanding and A-level accomplishments, contributed to large multimodal AI models (300M+ parameter) integrated into IBM platforms such as Watsonx and open-source tools like Granite released on Hugging Face. He collaborated with Fortune 50 companies, energy organizations, and institutions like NASA on computational and AI-driven projects.
Dr. k’s research has been cited 3100+ times and published in journals like Nature Machine Intelligence, AGU Earth’s Future, ACM Computing Surveys, Nature Reviews Bioengineering, IEEE Big Data, Atmospheric Research and by American Meteorological Society. His work has been featured in MIT Tech Review. He was a contributing research coauthor in the New York Times Bestseller Drawdown edited by Paul Hawken, that ranked climate solutions.
During his postdoctoral experiences, he trained with Turing Laureate Yoshua Bengio at Mila and leading roboticist Greg Dudek at McGill, co-authored a highly cited paper on climate change with leaders in machine learning, founded and chaired workshops in AI for Earth Sciences at NeurIPS, ICLR conferences and co-chaired American Meteorological Society AI committee sessions. He worked on exascale computing initiatives for the U.S. Department of Energy as a ML project scientist and was an invited visiting Postdoc AI scholar at Berkeley Lab. He co-founded the VC-backed climate AI startup Vayuh out of Berkeley, advised a health-tech start up acquired by LifeSpeak and organizations like the McConnell Foundation, and served as a senior reviewer for the Keeling Curve Prize.
k was a Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Office of Chief Executive PhD scholar in complex systems science and computational informatics with the Earth assessment group, energy and weather unit. At UNSW Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering (school spun out from Electrical Engineering by FRS Martin Green) he received a commonwealth Australian federal government funded doctorate. During his PhD he co-founded groundobs, an early climate-tech start up with a Rutherford Appleton European Space Agency grant; it was a Creative Destruction Lab AI stream finalist. He was also a Drawdown research fellow and research affiliate at Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He obtained a Masters from Imperial College London in Advanced Process Systems Engineering from the Department of Chemical Engineering. He was an exchange scholar at UCLA in electrical engineering during his BE(Hons.) from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Auckland, NZ.