Veena Srinivasan
Executive Director
WELL Labs
Dr Veena Srinivasan is leading WELL Labs’ mission to transform scientific research into real-world impact by designing solutions that simultaneously create livelihoods and conserve the environment. In 2022, she was listed as one of the top-cited scientists in the world.
Dr Veena Srinivasan has won several awards for her work, including the 2015 Jim Dooge Award for best paper in the journal Hydrology and Earth System Science from the European Geophysical Union and the 2012 Water Resources Research Editor’s Choice Award from the American Geophysical Union. She is also a recipient of the Teresa Heinz Environmental Scholars Award. Veena chairs the Strategic Advisory Group for the Integrated Monitoring Initiative for UN SDG6. She was the Prins Claus Chair at Utrecht University, Netherlands from 2018 to 2020. She joined the board of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in January 2024.
Research
Veena Srinivasan’s research has focused on understanding anthropogenic and climatic influences in urbanising watersheds and identifying appropriate policies and adaptation measures. As co‐PI of the “Adapting to Climate Change in Urbanizing Watersheds” (ACCUWa), she has focused on measuring and modelling the socio‐hydrology of Arkavathy and Noyyal basins to understand the impacts of human activity on ground and surface water resources.
She also initiated work on Bengaluru’s lakes with the goal of understanding how lakes can contribute to water security. This involved creating a citizen’s dashboard which synthesises data collected by citizen scientists and low‐cost sensors to manage lakes better.
Overall, Veena Srinivasan’s expertise lies in inter‐sectoral water allocation, impacts of multiple stressors on water resources, ground and surface water linkages, and sustainable water management policy and practice. She has worked on the importance of mapping the flow of water through cities, lake management, net water positivity in the Indian context, sustainable food production, and more.
Background
Veena received her PhD from Stanford University’s Emmet Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E‐IPER). She has a Masters in Energy and Environmental Studies from Boston University. She also has a B‐Tech in Engineering Physics from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
After her Master’s degree in Boston University, Veena worked in the energy sector in the US but didn’t enjoy the aggressive corporate workspace. She left the corporate sector to join the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development and began a PhD on the dynamics of Chennai’s water supply at Stanford University. While most PhD theses in the sector involve lab work, simulations and analysis of datasets, Veena did field work. This work paved the way for her initiatives to build links between research and impact. As a post‐doctoral scholar at Stanford, Veena Srinivasan was instrumental in developing a framework for a Global Freshwater Initiative at Stanford to understand patterns in the nature and causes of global water crises. After her PhD, she joined Pacific Institute.
In 2013, Veena joined the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) as a Senior Fellow. By 2018, she had written many cutting-edge papers but these did not always translate into impact on the ground. This is when she founded the Centre for Social and Environmental Innovation (CSEI). It would later evolve into WELL Labs and continue its work to translate the understanding of the problem into real-world solutions.