VCSIA Winner — Nandini Shiralkar
Hi, my name is Nandini, and I am a second-year engineering undergraduate at Trinity College. Despite the continued disruption brought on by the pandemic, I have been involved with many social projects here at Cambridge, two of which are particularly close to my heart.
During my first year, I founded the Cambridge Existential Risks Initiative (CERI), creating opportunities for students and young professionals across the world to pursue impactful research in existential risk mitigation on causes such as AI Safety and extreme climate change mitigation to name a few. CERI’s mission is to reduce existential risk by raising awareness of and promoting research within existential risks mitigation, via improving the junior research career pipeline.
After securing £50,000 funding last year, I led a virtual Summer Research Fellowship programme for promising students from seven different countries to conduct high impact existential risk mitigation research under the guidance of a CERI mentor. I also organised and hosted CERI’s inaugural research symposium, where Lord Martin Rees delivered a talk on the cosmic significance of existential risks.
CERI has started many interdisciplinary conversations, with engineers, scientists, policymakers, and many others coming together at our events with one aspiration: safeguarding the future of humanity. By matching participants with senior mentors, CERI has alleviated some of the key bottlenecks in the junior research career pipeline. The student team also runs local educational seminar programmes, helping students and professionals get up to speed on existential risks and how to mitigate them.
Earlier this year, CERI secured £550,000 funding from Open Philanthropy to support a summer research fellowship programme. The CERI Fellowship provides aspiring researchers with an in-person, paid, 10-week summer fellowship in Cambridge to conduct research and become immersed in the community developing ways to mitigate extreme threats to humanity. Participants gain support via mentorship from CERI’s network of researchers, policymakers, and grant makers, whilst contributing to actual existential risk research.
My vision for the future of CERI is one of ambition and hope. I hope that CERI’s growing network will spur recognised initiatives focused on existential risk reduction. My vision for the future of CERI is one about learning, collaborating, and most importantly motivating. It’s about the community that we are trying to build here at Cambridge and beyond. It’s about reducing existential risk by building resilient organisations and support systems. I also recently spoke about this at the Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk. Setting up CERI has been my most impactful project at Cambridge and I feel tremendously excited about what’s more to come.
Alongside my work with CERI, I have led the Trinity Responsible Investment Society (TRIS) to engage with the Bursary on issues pertaining to responsible investment. Under my leadership, TRIS has turned its focus to the broader social impacts of the College’s investments. Considering social sustainability across supply chains, including the protection of human rights, issues of health and safety, and how investors can help improve working conditions, is a natural next step to the progress made so far by the college.
During my spare time, I blog about engineering to inspire the next generation of engineers. You can also find out more about my other projects.
I hope to have a transformative positive impact on the society, and the Vice Chancellor’s Social Impact Award brings me a step closer to doing just that. I plan to drive forward the strong growth that CERI has seen in just over a year after its establishment. I hope to continue using my entrepreneurial skills to power my community building efforts at Cambridge by creating opportunities for research in existential risks and beyond. But most of all, I hope to do as much good as I can for the betterment of humanity.