Mr. Sourav Kumar is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam. His doctoral research focuses on the evaluation of earthquake-induced changes in groundwater composition, commonly known as hydro-geochemical earthquake precursors (associated with the slow accumulation of tectonic stress in the Earth’s crust) in northeast India.
Mr. Kumar obtained his bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering at Uttarakhand Technical University, Dehradun, in 2016. He completed his master’s degree in Earth System Science and Engineering under the Department of Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam, in 2018. He received the MHRD-GATE Fellowship for two years of his M.Tech. in 2016, where he studied the spatio-temporal variability in India’s groundwater storage using GRACE data. As his research expanded and segued into his doctoral research, he has presented his work at international conferences in 2019 and 2021.
As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, his primary objective is to understand the links between earthquakes and hydrological/hydro-geochemical variation that could be used as basic scientific input required for an impending earthquake prediction at both national and international levels. The proposed study could be used to correlate datasets from northeast India with those from other parts of the world such as Iceland, Japan, Korea, Italy, China, and the United States, that have reported similar earthquake-induced changes in groundwater composition.
In addition to his academic engagements, he also led the cricket team of IIT Guwahati at the ‘All-India Inter-IIT Sports Meet’ during 2017-19 and held several student representative posts at the institutional level throughout his college years.