Water Sustainability and Hydrological Extremes: Quantity, Quality, and Security

Manish Kumar earned Ph.D in Environmental Engineering from the University of Tokyo, Japan and is currently a faculty member at IIT Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India. He supervised 6 Ph.D thesis and >25 master dissertations. He contributed >100 journal articles, >50 book chapters and has edited/co-edited 6 books with international publishers. He has 20 years’ experience in research and teaching. He is an executive committee member of IWA-India Chapter and represents South-Asia in IWA specialist group for METRAL and related substances. He has won several accolades including Best Research Award (2013) at 4th Asia Pacific Water Young Professional Conference, two Best Poster Awards (2013 and 2016), DST young scientist grant, JSPS Research Fellowship, COE Young Researcher Fund, and Linnaeus-Palme Grant from SIDA, Sweden. He is associate editor for Elsevier’s Journal of Groundwater for Sustainable Development and Japan Society for Water’s journal Hydrological Research Letters. He was the lead editor for four virtual special issues for international journals including Journal of Hazardous Material. Most recently, he has joined a global collaboration of 51 institutes on Wastewater-Based Epidemiology of COVID-19.

Vivek Agarwal is a Lecturer at the School of Engineering, Northumbria University, Newcastle, United Kingdom. Before this, he pursued his PhD from the University of Nottingham in Geospatial Environment Engineering. His thesis title was “Study of groundwater properties and behavior using geospatial tools, and he was awarded “the best PhD Thesis award for his doctoral thesis. Dr. Agarwal has published 10+ international publications. He has a wide-ranging research interest in subjects related to civil engineering and interdisciplinary areas. His expertise is in remote sensing, GIS, water supply, hydraulics, fluid mechanics, water quality and sewage pollution. He intends to combine NASA’s GRACE gravity anomalies relating and InSAR land subsidence data relating them to groundwater quantity and quality variations. The aim of the research is to find solutions to the Climate Emergency by better understanding and managing the earth’s groundwater resources.

Rachel Gomes is a Professor in Chemical and Environmental Engineering with research into intelligent resource use in process environments, with a particular focus on waste/water treatment, water reuse, and process manufacturing for emerging pollutants and pollutant-to-product opportunities. She is head of the Food, Water, Waste (FWW) Research Group and leads the University of Nottingham Interdisciplinary Research Cluster, Water Works. Prof. Rachel has a PhD from Imperial College London and received the Wellcome Trust Value in People Award and was one of the '100 women, 100 visions' celebrating women scientists and engineers. Prof. Rachel has several funding portfolios from Research Councils, Charities and Industry Prof. Rachel have expertise in process resilience, circular economy, wastewater treatment, process manufacture, analytics, and modelling. She has been recognized with an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE)) for her services to research and to education in the 2022 Birthday Honors List.

Durga Prasad Panday is a faculty at Sustainability Cluster, UPES. He is a post-graduate in Water Resources Engineering from IIT Delhi. He has twice qualified the GATE exam with 99 percentiles. He has published several research articles including journal papers, book chapters and conference proceedings. His area of interest is Water resources modelling, Hydroclimatic extremes, Game-theoretic conflict resolution techniques, watershed management, water quality modelling and GIS. He has a teaching experience of 7 years. He is actively engaged in consultancy works in water resources and quality modelling.