Welcome — I’m Aadhi Mohanavelu.
Aadhi Mohanavelu
Ph.D. Candidate, Civil & Environmental Engineering
Stanford University
I study how infrastructure systems perform for people in cities and rapidly developing regions. My work focuses on water service delivery, environmental risk, spatial analytics, sensing, and computational decision-support tools that help communities, agencies, and governments understand everyday infrastructure services and plan more reliable, equitable, and climate-resilient systems.
About
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. My research sits at the intersection of infrastructure systems, water service delivery, environmental risk, spatial analytics, and public decision-making. I develop metrics, models, and decision-support tools to understand how infrastructure systems perform for households, communities, and the agencies responsible for serving them.
My work combines household surveys, fieldwork, qualitative interviews, statistical and machine-learning methods, causal inference, geospatial data, sensing, and community-engaged research. Across this work, I am interested in turning lived service experiences into evidence that can support better infrastructure planning, policy, and design decisions.
I am especially interested in cities and rapidly developing regions where climate stress, institutional constraints, and uneven infrastructure access shape everyday service delivery. My current work includes field research on water service quality in heterogeneous provision systems, climate-health and environmental risk research in Sri Lanka, and computational tools for infrastructure planning and project delivery.
Research keywords
- Infrastructure systems
- Water service delivery
- Environmental risk
- Spatial analytics
- Sensing & field data
- Policy simulation
- Climate adaptation
- Rapidly developing regions
- Community-engaged research
- Infrastructure planning
Research Agenda
How communities, agencies, and governments can measure, model, and improve infrastructure systems that better serve people.
Measure
Developing end-user metrics, field methods, and sensing approaches to understand how infrastructure systems perform for households, communities, and service providers.
Model
Using statistical modeling, causal inference, machine learning, geospatial analysis, and policy simulation to study how infrastructure regimes, climate stress, and institutional constraints shape service outcomes.
Design
Building decision-support tools and applied research outputs that help communities, agencies, and governments compare alternatives, prioritize investments, and improve infrastructure service delivery.
Selected Work & Current Directions
A few projects that represent the direction of my research.
Infrastructure service measurement and policy design
End-user metrics, structural standardization methods, and household-level policy simulation models for water service delivery in heterogeneous infrastructure systems.
Doctoral research · Manuscripts in preparation
Water Service Metrics Dashboard
A research dashboard for standardizing, visualizing, and comparing water service metrics from household survey data, with initial development supported by the King Center on Global Development.
Exploratory research direction
Climate, environment, and health
Research on hydro-climatic conditions, water quality, microclimate, and environmental factors associated with kidney stone disease risk in Sri Lanka.
Interdisciplinary collaboration · Stanford School of Medicine
Teaching
Snapshot of teaching and mentoring.
I support teaching in smart cities, sustainability design thinking, and equitable infrastructure systems at Stanford. My teaching and mentoring connect infrastructure planning, environmental risk, equity, and data-driven decision-making, with attention to how engineering tools can better serve communities and public agencies.
I have contributed research-based course materials on infrastructure service delivery, environmental risk, and equity-centered planning, and I have mentored undergraduate researchers on field measurement, sensing, prototyping, and data analysis.
Teaching interests: infrastructure systems · water service delivery · environmental data analysis · infrastructure policy and planning · climate and infrastructure resilience · engineering for equity · service delivery in rapidly developing regions.