Informing Infrastructure: How Sylvia Imanirakiza’s Fellowship Powers Progress
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Sylvia Imanirakiza, a PhD student in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), has been named a recipient of the Schlumberger Foundation’s Faculty for the Future fellowship, in recognition of her work developing machine learning methods and low-cost sensing technologies to monitor, characterize, and uncover inequities in critical infrastructure systems. Our team recently spoke with Sylvia to learn more about her work and how her focus on infrastructure considers the everyday realities of electricity, water and other essential services.
For Imanirakiza, the fellowship is deeply connected to the reasons she pursued her research in the first place. “Growing up in Uganda, one of the things that I was very much seeing day-to-day in my life was access to electricity,” she said. “We had a lot of power outages. If it’s not a power outage, the quality of electricity is really bad.”
Those experiences stayed with her. As an undergraduate, Imanirakiza initially imagined herself pursuing biomedical engineering and worked on machine learning for medical imaging. But again and again, she ran into the same underlying problem.
“Even when you build all these nice and impactful innovations, they didn’t have the electricity to actually power what they wanted to use it for,” she said.
Today, her research focuses on developing computational and machine learning approaches to address critical infrastructure gaps, particularly in resource-constrained and data-scarce settings. Her work aims to generate new information about infrastructure systems where conventional monitoring is limited or absent, helping communities, utilities and policymakers better understand the services people actually receive.
One branch of her research uses computational photography and off-the-shelf cameras as non-intrusive sensors to measure electric grid conditions such as voltage quality. By repurposing inexpensive cameras to infer grid parameters, she hopes to provide low-cost alternatives to traditional sensing infrastructure and enable more spatially and temporally detailed monitoring of electricity networks. Another line of research uses publicly available urban data and machine learning methods to infer the locations and characteristics of underground infrastructure networks, including drinking water, wastewater and gas systems in regions where infrastructure records are incomplete or unavailable. She is also interested in developing algorithmic approaches to identify hidden inequities in infrastructure access and service provision.
“How can I design low-cost ways to measure and understand infrastructure systems?” she asked. “Even in places that appear to have adequate services, there are communities that remain unmeasured and underserved because the data simply do not exist.”
Much of Imanirakiza’s fieldwork takes place in Kampala, Uganda, and Nairobi, Kenya, where she studies how electricity quality experienced by households differs from measurements reported by utilities at substations and other grid infrastructure. Her goal is to provide communities with better evidence about the quality of services they receive while helping utilities and regulators identify gaps in infrastructure performance.
“You’re saying I’m receiving this voltage,” she said, imagining residents challenging utility companies, “but if you measure it from where I am as a community, as a homestead, that’s not what we are getting.”
The Faculty for the Future fellowship will fund the next year of Imanirakiza’s Ph.D., but she says its impact goes far beyond financial support. The award also creates time and space for the parts of academic life she values most: mentorship, leadership and community engagement.
A commitment to mentorship is personal. Because much of her fieldwork takes place in East Africa, Imanirakiza collaborates with undergraduate students at Makerere University, mentoring and training them in power quality research while introducing them to research careers and graduate school pathways. “I get to work with amazing students over time,” she said. “It gives me an opportunity to give back to my university.”
In many ways, she sees herself continuing a cycle that first opened research to her. As an undergraduate, faculty mentors introduced her to coding and research opportunities that transformed her trajectory.
“I always say I wouldn’t be here without these professors. When I get to do this with students back home, I get to give back in the same way that others created opportunities for me.”
Like many international graduate students, Imanirakiza said the transition to life and research in the United States was not always easy. Conducting fieldwork across continents while navigating graduate school presented logistical and emotional challenges, as did working in STEM as a woman of color.
But she credits much of her success to the communities she found at UMass Amherst and beyond.
She points first to her adviser, Prof. Jay Taneja and her lab mates, who reviewed fellowship materials and supported her throughout the application process, as well as the African Graduate and Scholars Association at UMass, which connected her with past fellowship recipients for guidance and interview preparation.
Another unexpected source of support came from the university’s Three Minute Thesis competition, where she emerged as one of the top 11 finalists this year. Imanirakiza received her fellowship interview invitation during the same period she was preparing to explain her research in just three minutes before a live audience.
“I think it put me in a very good headspace,” she said. “I was getting a lot of feedback from people, and I was in a very good position.”
Beyond UMass, Imanirakiza also points to mentors and leadership programs in Uganda that encouraged her to think beyond academics alone. She described herself as once shy and singularly focused on grades before joining Project Girls for Girls Uganda, a mentorship organization that introduced her to women leaders in STEM and encouraged her to see herself as a leader, too.
“I was a good student — I was an A student — but that was all that was about me,” she said. “It lit a fire inside me in terms of being interested in leadership and community.”
That sense of responsibility now shapes how she imagines her future after graduate school. While she remains committed to research, she is equally motivated by ensuring that advances in artificial intelligence and data science translate into more equitable infrastructure planning, policy and service delivery.
“I really want to contribute back home,” she said. “Having access to this community of scientists allows me to actually see how women scientists are taking intentional steps to contribute back home.”
Looking ahead, Imanirakiza hopes to build a career spanning research, education and science policy, working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and sustainable development. She ultimately hopes to collaborate with universities, national laboratories and scientific institutions, particularly across Africa, to support evidence-based policymaking and responsible technology deployment.
For Imanirakiza, infrastructure has never been abstract. It is the foundation that allows communities to thrive — and the absence of it can determine who gets opportunities, care and stability. Through her research, she hopes to make invisible inequities in infrastructure systems visible, one measurement at a time.