Alum navigates the ‘valley of death’ with skills learned bringing a new lab to life

Plenty of students come to Blacksburg to work in Virginia Tech’s Advanced Propulsion and Power Lab. As a Ph.D. student, Siddhartha "Sid" Gadiraju '18 actually helped put the lab together.

It wasn’t what Gadiraju expected to be doing when he arrived in Blacksburg in 2014 after finishing his undergraduate degree in India and his master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Stony Brook University. Virginia Tech’s industry-funded studies in combustion caught his attention, and the Advanced Propulsion and Power Lab (APPL) was the place where exciting real world applications with turbines were coming together.

But when he arrived, the lab was still in its early stages.

“When I joined, the APPL was finishing construction,” he said. “I was one of the first students there, and the building was just a building with nothing inside. We were tasked with designing the pipes and safety systems which would be used by our lab.”

Because the experience of building out the lab’s research facilities and instrumentation came so unexpectedly, he considers it almost accidental. Yet the opportunity turned out to be a blessing in disguise, equipping him with logistical skills that helped him rise more quickly in his career.

“To be frank, as I student, I initially viewed these logistics as a distraction from research, but I’m glad I did all those things,” Gadiraju said. “It really made me what I am today.”

Finding help in a team of experts

Srinath Ekkad, now at North Carolina State University, was the faculty researcher in charge of the lab and remembers Gadiraju’s role in building the lab facilities.

“Sid was instrumental in working on the combustion rig that we had, and he had it built from scratch working with another student, David Gomez,” Ekkad said. “The unique challenge was that there was no precedent for that type of rig, so we were flying blind and working totally on our gut feeling.”

On gut feelings, they built the lab testing facilities and their safety systems. Then Gadiraju worked with regulatory groups, design certifiers, and professional engineers to make the lab operational. Writing safety code brought him to the Office of Environmental Health and Safety. He was also deeply involved with the fiscal team and the machine shop within the Department of Mechanical Engineering, filled with seasoned staff who were familiar with the work of putting logistical pieces together.

“The team in the Randolph Hall machine shop were wonderful. They were the ones who taught me how to truly design, because they knew how to actually make it,” he said. “We were also managing the project money funded by the Department of Energy and Rolls-Royce, and [fiscal tech] Diana Israel taught us how to maintain the budget and buy what we needed. I learned these skills outside the academic area, and they made me stand out in industry.”

The accidental skills pay off

Because he understood the process of building a lab, machinery, and instruments from his projects at the Advanced Propulsion and Power Lab, after earning his doctorate Gadiraju joined a deep-tech startup innovating a new class of residential heat pumps. Leveraging the regulatory fluency he gained at at the lab, he recognized that existing safety standards hadn’t kept pace with modern technology. Beyond his core engineering duties, he stepped up to help the industry rewrite safety codes, modernizing them to ensure that next-generation clean energy solutions could be safely deployed to meet this decade’s climate necessities.

Today, Gadiraju works in the field of carbon removal at an international climate tech company called Carbo Culture. Based in California, the producer of 80 percent of the world’s almonds and 100 percent of the commercial supply in the U.S., the company is finding new ways to repurpose the millions of tons of waste from the discarded shells of the popular nut and other agri-waste. Their approach is to capture the carbon in the shells by creating biochar/biocarbon, which can enrich the soil and reduce carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.

Gadiraju joined the company as they were taking their process from lab scale to commercial scale.

“In startups we call that the ‘valley of death,’” he said, “because many companies fail at that point if they cannot bridge the gap between a lab concept and a commercial reality.”

Luckily, the skills that Gadiraju had acquired building the Advanced Propulsion and Power Lab constituted the very skills he needed to help his company navigate the valley of death.

“The experiments that I do now remind me of my time at the APPL,” he said. “We used to use advanced laser diagnostics to get data, and the experiment would last a few seconds. Preparing for the experiment would take three hours. The surrounding work of managing the team, I learned by working with interns that joined the lab. Understanding how to work with vendors is something I learned working with the machine shop team at Randolph Hall. Working with Diana [Israel] taught me how to manage project upheavals.”

Gadiraju estimates 70 percent of his work is managing auxiliary processes that he first explored while setting up the lab in Blacksburg. As he progresses in the professional world, his academic studies will always make him an innovator. His practical skills will also give him the ability to make those breakthroughs a reality.