Hello, I’m
Aadhi Mohanavelu
Ph.D. Candidate, Civil & Environmental Engineering
Stanford University
I study how infrastructure systems perform for end users, with a core focus on water service delivery in rapidly urbanizing and climate-vulnerable regions. My work turns household and spatial evidence into practical tools for more reliable, equitable, and resilient infrastructure planning.
About
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, advised by Dr. Khalid K. Osman in the Osman Lab.
My research examines the gap between infrastructure provision and the service people actually receive. I combine household surveys, interviews, field measurements, and open-source spatial and public datasets to generate evidence for infrastructure planning, policy, and design.
Water systems are the core empirical setting for my doctoral research. Within this work, I focus particularly on regions shaped by rapid urbanization, climate stress, institutional constraints, and uneven access. My current projects examine water service quality across heterogeneous provision systems, environmental and climate-related drivers of kidney stone disease in Sri Lanka, and computational tools for infrastructure planning, policy simulation, and project delivery.
Research keywords
- Infrastructure service delivery
- Urban water systems
- Spatial analytics and machine learning
- Policy simulation
- Climate and environmental health
- Community-engaged research
- Decision-support tools
Research Agenda
How communities, agencies, and governments can measure, model, and improve infrastructure systems that better serve people.
Measure
Creating comparable evidence of infrastructure performance by translating household experiences, field observations, and service conditions into end-user metrics.
Model
Evaluating how provision regimes, climate stress, and institutional constraints shape service quality, equity, and environmental risk.
Design
Turning empirical evidence into planning tools that help communities and public agencies compare alternatives, prioritize investments, and improve service delivery.
Selected Work & Current Directions
A few projects that represent the direction of my research.
Infrastructure service measurement and policy design
Household-level metrics and policy simulation models for evaluating water service quality, reliability, and equity across heterogeneous provision systems.
Doctoral research · Manuscripts in preparation
Global water service metrics platform
An interactive platform for visualizing, benchmarking, and comparing household water service conditions across diverse contexts.
Web platform under development
Climate, water infrastructure, and health
An interdisciplinary study of how climate variation, water quality, and local infrastructure conditions relate to kidney stone disease risk in Sri Lanka.
Interdisciplinary collaboration · Stanford School of Medicine
Selected Stanford Support
My graduate research and training have been supported by the King Center on Global Development, the UPS Foundation, the Woods Institute for the Environment, the Stanford CEE M.S. Departmental Fellowship, and the Quad Fellowship.
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, spatial analysis, environmental risk, equity, and data-driven decision-making.
I have contributed research-based course materials on infrastructure service delivery, environmental risk, and equity-centered planning, and mentored undergraduate researchers on field measurement, sensing, prototyping, and data analysis.
Teaching interests: infrastructure systems · urban infrastructure and service delivery · spatial analysis for infrastructure planning · infrastructure policy · climate resilience · engineering for equity · planning under resource constraints.