Hello!

Engineering geologist working on slope failures and their effects on mountain infrastructure.

I completed my PhD at the Centre for Disaster Mitigation and Management, Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), under Dr. G. P. Ganapathy. My thesis looked at landslides along road corridors in the Nilgiris, Southern India, using geophysics and geospatial methods to study both natural causes and ground vibrations from traffic.

Before that, I did an M.Sc. in Applied Geology at the University of Madras and a B.Sc. in Geology at Thiruvalluvar University. I have also worked as a Teaching cum Research Assistant at VIT, and interned in earthquake geophysics at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology and in hydrogeology at the Central Ground Water Board.

What I work on:

Landslides in the Western Ghats are usually blamed on rainfall alone, but roads and traffic on fragile slopes add stresses that rarely get measured. My research tries to fill that gap. I use field geophysics to understand what lies beneath these slopes, and machine learning models built on maintenance records to map where failures are most likely. The aim is practical: maps and numbers that road and railway agencies can actually use to decide where to spend on mitigation. I plan to extend this work to other hazards and other mountain regions.