Assistant Professor
Physics and Mathematics
sumithra.surendralal@ssla.edu.in
Sumithra aims to cultivate a disposition towards making rather than merely consuming; whether that means constructing a mathematical model, developing an argument, designing an investigation, or creating a new way of understanding a problem. She hopes students come to appreciate the difference between encountering a finished idea and participating in the work of coming up with, testing, and refining one. Such work requires imagination and a willingness to ‘play’. Far from being opposed to rigour, play is often what allows new questions, connections, and possibilities to emerge.
Sumithra Surendralal is interested in how models help us make sense of complex phenomena. Trained as a physicist, her work began with computational studies of biological sequence generation, and has gradually expanded to questions about how modelling is learned, taught, and used in scientific inquiry. Across both research and teaching, she is interested in how representations help us move from observation to explanation. In her doctoral research at The Pennsylvania State University, she studied the structure of songbird songs, using probabilistic models to infer the hidden mechanisms that gave rise to observed vocal sequences. While situated within neuroscience, this work also drew on concepts closely related to those used in computational linguistics and language modelling. More recently, her interests have turned to modelling as a scientific practice and an educational goal. She is particularly interested in how students learn to build and use models of the real world, and in how the practices of scientific inquiry can be made accessible to learners.
