Gayathri's scientific research is in the areas of renewable energy, climate change resilience, environmental remediation and data science for environmental applications. She received her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has worked in corporate as well as academic settings, including Argonne National Laboratory and Facebook. Her work has been funded by the US Department of Energy, US Department of Agriculture and the Keck Foundation. As a researcher, her work has been recognized by the US National Academies of Science and Engineering for innovative environmental research and she was invited by the White House in 2014 to participate in the conference on innovation in clean technology and big data.