Geoinformatics for Sustainable Urban Development

Sulochana Shekhar is Dean of the School of Earth Sciences and Head of the Department of Geography at the Central University of Tamil Nadu, Thiruvarur, India. She is the proud recipient of the Erasmus Mundus (European Commission) Fellowship, Commonwealth Academic Fellowship (United Kingdom), and Endeavour Research Fellowship (Australia). Her research interests include urban geography and the application of remote sensing and geospatial techniques in urban environments. She is presently teaching urban geography and the fundamentals and applications of Geoinformatics at the post-graduation level. She has worked on cellular automata-based urban growth models and urban sprawl assessment using entropy for her doctoral research. Object-based image analysis was the main theme of her post-doctoral research at ITC, Netherlands. She has previously worked on projects involving spatial decision support systems for slums (UCL, UK) and extraction of slums and urban green space using object-based image analysis (UTAS, Australia). She has completed major funded projects on housing the urban poor (HUDCO), and the environmental impact of urbanisation (UGC-Major) using geospatial techniques. She has collaborated with Cambridge University, UK, and completed the UKIERI research project on the interactive spatial decision support system for managing public health. She recently wrapped up a DST project about urban heat island studies using multi-source remote sensing data. Under this project, she has developed an urban spectral library for selected urban built-up surface materials. Currently, she is working on building sustainable and resilient cities.

Deepak Kumar is an academic research professional with over 10 years of experience. Dr Kumar has been working as a Research Scientist since August 2022 at the Center of Excellence in Weather and Climate Analytics, Atmospheric Science Research Center (ASRC), State University of New York (SUNY), University at Albany (UAlbany), New York (USA). He has been associated with Amity University Uttar Pradesh, Noida (India), as a full-time Assistant Professor from 2016. He has been revisiting a wide range of issues associated with traditional research activities in the intersection area of Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics, Information Science, Energy Sciences, Climate Sciences, Sustainable Urban Studies, Environment and Climate Change, Urban Weather and Climate Modelling, Database Systems, Data Analysis and Visualization. He has completed two government- sponsored research projects namely "Hybrid Urban Landscape Analysis for Green Smart Cities through Geospatial Technology" sponsored by the Science and Engineering Research Board, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, and "Meta- sensing of the urban footprint from airborne synthetic aperture radar (ASAR) data" sponsored from Space Applications Centre (ISRO), Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India as a sole principal investigator. Dr Kumar has led a cross-functional research team for project development, management, laboratory setups, and supervision, along with academic research training for undergraduate, postgraduate, and PhD students and fellow researchers. He has published 45+ research articles in high-impact web of science/Scopus-indexed international journals by Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Emerald, SAGE, and Wiley publications. He has reviewed more than 150+ research articles as an ad-hoc/adjunct/invited reviewer or editorial board member for high-impact factor journals published by IEEE, Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis Group, Wiley, SAGE, Emerald, MDPI. He has supervised four PhD students and 29 postgraduate students. He has conducted 15 academic, research, and industrial visits for undergraduate students. He encourages researchers to develop their skills, knowledge, and experience through conference appearances, outreach activities, and the contribution of professional membership of learned bodies. He is a member of a lifetime member of various prestigious professional bodies like IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, American Geophysical Union (AGU), European Geosciences Union (EGU), Member of American Meteorological Society (AMS), International Association for Urban Climate (IAUC), American Association of Geographers (AAG), International Geographical Union (IGU), International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing etc.