Dr. Rajib Sarkar is currently working as an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, IIT(ISM) Dhanbad. He has completed M.Tech and Ph.D. from IIT Roorkee. He is a recipient of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) fellowship for post-doctoral research at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom (UK). Dr. Sarkar has supervised five research scholars who have been awarded a Ph.D. degree and other six are in progress. His broad research area is geotechnical earthquake engineering. His core areas of research are soil-pile-structure interaction, liquefaction, seismic hazard analysis, and discrete element modelling. Dr. Sarkar has authored 53 refereed journal publications of international repute and 31 conference/symposium publications along with 13 book chapters. He is currently working on several research projects sponsored by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), Coal India Limited (CIL), National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) amongst others. He has also completed several consultancy projects of national importance. He is also the Associate Editor of the Indian Society of Earthquake Technology’s (ISET) Journal of Earthquake Technology. Dr. Sarkar has been awarded a gold medal by the University of North Bengal and the Indian Service of Engineers prize from IIT Roorkee. He is a recipient of the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award in Soil-Structure Interaction from the ISET. He has also received the Young Engineers Award from the Institution of Engineers, India in recognition of his contributions to the field of Civil Engineering. Prof. B.K. Maheshwari, is a Professor of Soil Dynamics in the Department of Earthquake Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee. Currently, he is also serving as a President of Indian Society of Earthquake Technology (ISET). Dr. Maheshwari completed his bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Jodhpur, master's degree in Earthquake Engineering from the University of Roorkee and Ph.D. from the Saitama University Japan. He also worked as Engineer in Tokyo, Japan and then as a post-doctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America (USA). Prof. Maheshwari is serving as a faculty in IIT Roorkee since 2004. He has about 30 years of research experience and working in all areas of geotechnical earthquake engineering, particularly dynamic soil-structure interaction, liquefaction, dynamic soil properties, constitutive modelling, nonlinear finite element analysis, slope stability, landslides and disaster mitigation & management. He has published 190 research articles including 65 papers in journals of international repute. Under Prof. Maheshwari’s guidance, ten Ph.D. theses were awarded and the other four are in progress. He worked on 8 sponsored research projects funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), the Ministry of Earth Sciences and the Norwegian Government. He has also worked on many industrial consultancy projects and carried out surveys for many damaging earthquakes. Prof. Maheshwari has been awarded a gold medal from the University of Roorkee, Monbusho Fellowship for Ph.D. in Japan and Engineer in Training (EIT) from Ohio State Board, USA. He has been awarded IIT Roorkee’s prestigious Shamsher Prakash Research Award. He has also been awarded the Excellent Research Contribution Award by the International Association of Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics (IACMAG) in Kyoto, Japan. Prof. Maheshwari has served as the Head of the Centre of Excellence in Disaster Mitigation and Management, IIT Roorkee between 2015 to 2018. He was part of the delegation for the India-Japan High-Level Policy Dialogue on Education, led by the Secretary, Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) to Tokyo, Japan in July 2016. Dr. Maheshwari was the Organizing Secretary for the prestigious 16th Symposium on Earthquake Engineering held in December 2018 at IIT Roorkee. He served as a Shamsher Prakash Chair Professor between 2019 to 2022. Recently, Prof. Maheshwari was awarded the John Booker Medal during the 16th International Conference of the International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics (IACMAG) held in Torino, Italy in September 2022. Currently he is serving as a Chair to organize 8th International Conference on Recent Advances in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering (8ICARGEE) to be held in IIT Guwahati in December 2024. Dr. Abhishek Kumar is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering at IIT Guwahati. Before joining IIT Guwahati in 2014, Dr Kumar also worked in Geostructure, Larsen and Toubro, Chennai office as Assistant Engineering Manager. His primary areas of research include seismic microzonation or urban centres, seismic source zonation, seismic hazard analysis, synthetic ground motion development, forward and inverse ground response analysis, stability analysis of Tailing pond embankment and ground improvement. He has so far guided 6 PhDs and many more are under progress. Dr. Kumar has published over 48 research papers in various reputed journals. He has also published over 43 conference papers and 7 book chapters. Dr. Kumar is a recipient of the Young Engineer Award from the Indian National Academy of Engineering in the area of Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering. He has also received the Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research (INSPIRE) faculty award from the Department of Science & Technology (DST) and the Young Engineer award from the Institution of Engineers, India. Dr. Kumar is the Subject Matter Expert from two NPTEL courses namely, 1) Subsurface exploration: Importance and Techniques involved; and 2) Applied Seismology for Engineers. Dr. Kumar has been working with different agencies including the Department of Science and Technology, Ministry of Earth Science, Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited, National Highways & Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited (NHIDCL), JSW amongst others for various research and consultancy projects.
