Dr. Kalai Ramea calls herself an all-purpose scientist. The label is modest. The career it describes is anything but.
Her journey began in civil and transportation engineering — designing traffic signals, laying fiber optic networks, mapping ITS devices across Orange County.
A PhD at UC Davis changed the trajectory. Ramea pioneered new methods for integrating human behavior into large-scale energy systems models — work published in Nature Energy and Energy Policy.
At Xerox PARC, she built BEBO — a bilingual COVID-19 benefits chatbot — won Most Innovative Application 2020, directed DARPA and NASA-funded research, and rose to lead a team of ten.
In 2023 she co-founded Planette AI. Transformer-based models outperformed NOAA and ECMWF benchmarks. She raised $2.4M VC and $300K NSF.
Today as an independent researcher at South Park Commons, she is exploring to use agentic AI and MCP for real-world applications.
