Computational Mobility Scientist Honored With Colorado Governor's Award for High-Impact Research
Over Her Career, K. Shankari Charted a Path for Communities To Collect and Understand Their Own Multimodal Mobility Data
In just three years as a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), K. Shankari successfully enabled communities to collect impactful multimodal data and went on detail to the U.S. Joint Office of Energy and Transportation (Joint Office) to ensure the reliable buildout of a national electric vehicle charging network.
Recently her efforts were widely recognized when she received an Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award from Colorado Gov. Jared Polis in recognition of her outstanding initiative, inspiration, and collaboration skills demonstrated within the first five years after receiving her Ph.D. Shankari was presented with the award during a fall 2023 ceremony at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science presented by CO-LABS to celebrate Colorado’s top scientists and research accomplishments. CO-LABS is a consortium of federally funded Colorado research institutions that aims to spotlight Colorado as a center for impactful, world-changing scientific research.
But Shankari’s passion for transportation decarbonization actually began long ago with a humble two-wheeler: a bicycle.
Shankari received her very first bicycle in the eighth grade. What she did not foresee was that it would go on to become her primary means of mobility through college and even her first few years in the workforce.
“I had the same bicycle for 10 years,” Shankari said. “People at school knew me as the ‘biking girl.’ I became infamous for taking my bike around.”
When she first attempted to pursue a doctoral degree in computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a family crisis prompted her to drop the program and pursue a career in industry that would allow her to support her family. It was only after decades had passed that Shankari’s familial situation stabilized to where she could act on her intensifying resolve to help mitigate the impacts of climate change in any way she could and return to pursue her doctorate degree.
“When I took that leave of absence from my doctoral program, I thought that I’d just go into an industry, take care of the family, and return to school ‘soon,’” Shankari recounted. “It ended up being more than a decade before I could really ask myself, ‘What do I do with the rest of my life?’”
Identifying the Need for Collecting Community-Level Micromobility Data
She met with various professors until she found two co-advisors who wholeheartedly believed in her novel idea of advancing equitable access to transportation through advanced systems data collection and computation.
Her vision for equitable access to transportation and related data was cemented through nearly a decade of advocacy before and during her doctoral program. She attended her local bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee as a private citizen to raise concerns about transportation safety and infrastructure that she encountered while biking around town with her young children. The city council then selected her to serve on a five-person committee that presents recommendations regarding local transportation matters and proposals.
During this time, she saw the limitations of transportation data collection with existing mechanisms, especially for bicycle and bus infrastructure proposals where car-oriented data models dominated the discussion.
She made it her mission to give transportation planners and stakeholders a tool that could provide a complete view of travel behavior by collecting data across all trips and all modes and calculate the corresponding carbon footprint. From this deficit in data that omitted the perspective of non-car users, Shankari formulated the idea for the novel modular open-source platform “e-mission”—what would later become NREL’s Open Platform for Agile Trip Heuristics (NREL OpenPATH).
“I knew from many years of building systems that if you don’t have the right tools, you won’t know how to implement system solutions,” Shankari explained. “When I was on the city council, there was just no data to back up anything other than cars. What if I could figure out a way to actually capture the full travel experience—bicycles, buses, cars, scooters, and the ways that travelers stitched them together to get around—so that we could realistically identify transportation system bottlenecks? There’s so much we could do with that data, so I went back to graduate school to figure it out.”
Paving a Path for a Free-To-Access Multimodal Mobility Tool
Shankari found it challenging to explore interdisciplinary research as a graduate student. She was met with significant skepticism for her unusual endeavor to incorporate mobility and computer science aspects into her publications without an academic track record in either field.
Widespread usage of her tool as a software engineering product by mobility science experts was not forthcoming, and neither was widespread acceptance of her concept as sufficiently novel and intellectually stimulating by computer science experts. Furthermore, there was disinterest from industry sponsors due to her insistence on eschewing commercialization in favor of transparency and accessibility for her project.
“It was really difficult to get traction,” Shankari recalled. “I still remember my graduate school exit survey that asked if I was going to stay in academia. With more than 30 rejections during my postgraduate job search, it just wasn’t clear where my research was headed.”
Shankari nearly returned to industry when she discovered the like-minded interdisciplinary and impact-focused research cohorts at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory. With support from NREL and DOE, she successfully converted her doctoral research artifact into NREL OpenPATH, a practical tool that communities can access and customize at no cost to them.
As community deployments of NREL OpenPATH and engagements continue to increase, so are the real-world datasets, and she seized the momentum to conduct use-inspired research that was not possible before with smaller datasets. Today, she continues to further extract and address generalizable research problems from the field deployments of NREL OpenPATH to improve usability, scalability, and scientific rigor.
“When I was considering what to do with my life, I still think to myself it would’ve been so much easier to get a sports car,” Shankari laughed. “But I really wanted to work on climate change.”
Guiding the Development of a Charging Network and Student Cohort
A recent appointment to the new Joint Office expands Shankari’s work to help holistically decarbonize the transportation sector. The Joint Office recognized that although initial electric vehicle research in the transportation sector focused on vehicle drivetrains, a network of charging stations that consistently work as intended is paramount to overcome driver range anxiety and promote widespread adoption.
Shankari was onboarded as the principal software architect of the Standards and Reliability Pillar at the Joint Office for her expertise in travel behavior and her personal experience as an early adopter of an electric car. In this position, she will guide the software aspects of building out a national network of interoperable and reliable charging infrastructure for electric vehicles.
She finds time for this role on top of her already-prolific mentorship. Through DOE’s premier Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program, Community College Internship (CCI) program, and within her NREL OpenPATH team, Shankari has mentored more than 25 students in three years. She now hosts one of the largest intern cohorts in her research department through NREL OpenPATH projects.
“Even in technology, the human piece is so important,” Shankari said. “It was really empowering to highlight the need to involve communities and have an equitable lens on transportation decarbonization through this award. And it has motivated me even more to keep mentoring my students, keep working on vehicle charging network software, and keep refining NREL OpenPATH for community use.”
Learn more about NREL's transportation and mobility research, including the laboratory's mobility behavioral science capabilities and opportunities to implement NREL OpenPATH.