Dr. Amit Kumar is an Assistant Professor of Geoinformatics at the Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi. He earned his Ph.D. in remote sensing technology from the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra. His research focuses on urban ecology and sustainability, and anthropogenic and climate change impacts on urban and forest ecosystems. Some of his current projects include DBT-Mapping and quantitative assessment of plant resources in Central India; R&D projects sponsored by Space Application Centre (ISRO) under AVIRIS-NG; L&S band SAR-NISAR; GISAT missions; a project sponsored by Columbia University; and IISc, Bengaluru coordinated Long-term Ecological Observatories program of forest dynamics and soil processes developed under the Climate Change Action Plan of MoEFCC at pan India scale. Dr. Kumar is also a member of the IUCN-Commission on Ecosystem Management, South Asia and Global Forests Biodiversity Initiatives, USA, as well as a recipient of Fellow and Young Scientist awards of SSCE, New Delhi, SERB-ITSS, Government of India among others. He has published more than 100 research articles in different journals and books of international repute, including Nature Ecology and Evolution, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), Science of The Total Environment, and CITIES.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Kumar is building an improved global forest above-ground biomass map in the Anthropocene using large-scale forest inventory data, high-resolution satellite observations, and machine learning techniques at Purdue University. His research will help in developing strategies to accomplish SDGs 13 and 15, which aim at sustainable forest management, by providing insights into the global carbon budget within diverse forest ecosystems.