Priya Donti

Priya Donti is an Assistant Professor and the Silverman (1968) Family Career Development Professor at MIT EECS and LIDS. Her research focuses on safe and robust machine learning for high-renewables power grids. Priya is also a co-founder and Chair of Climate Change AI, a global nonprofit initiative to catalyze impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning. Priya received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University. She was recognized as part of the MIT Technology Review’s 2021 list of 35 Innovators Under 35, Vox’s 2023 Future Perfect 50, and the 2025 TIME100 AI list, and is a recipient of the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, the ACM SIGEnergy Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Siebel Scholarship, the U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, and best paper honorable mentions at ICML and ACM e-Energy.

AI2050 Project

Power grids are responsible for a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and must be rapidly transitioned to using low-carbon energy sources (such as solar and wind) in order to address climate change. Unfortunately, the amount of power produced by solar panels and wind turbines changes based on the weather, which is tricky to manage given that power grids must always exactly balance between power supply and demand and satisfy other important physical constraints. Priya Donti’s AI2050 project develops physics-informed machine learning methods that help safely maintain this balance by optimizing batteries and other flexible devices. This improves our ability to integrate more low-carbon energy into power grids.