Bridging Water Quality and Quantity in the Anthropocene

Prof. Manish Kumar
Dr. Manish Kumar is a Distinguished Professor at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico & Institute Professor at Chuo University Japan, and at UPES, India. Previously, Dr. Kumar was director of the Sustainability Cluster in the School of Advanced Engineering at UPES, Dehradun, India; and faculty member at IIT Gandhinagar; and Tezpur University in India. With a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the University of Tokyo, Japan, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, he has authored 300+ articles, 50+ book chapters, and 20+ books, ranking among the top 2% scientists globally. His research spans wastewater epidemiology, climate change, and sustainable water management. Prof. Kumar led multi-institutional projects funded by UNICEF on wastewater epidemiology; the Asia-Pacific Network (APN) on Global Change Research on climate change effect on water availability in India and Sri Lanka, and the UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI) project on Water Sustainability, among others. Prof. Kumar render(s)ed editorial services to journals like ES&T Letters, ES&T-Engineering, Nature Partner Journals (NPJ) Clean Water, Science of the Total Environment, Current Pollution Report (Springer), Groundwater for Sustainable Development, Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, Hydrological Research Letter, and others.

Prof. Durga Prasad Panday
Dr. Durga Prasad Panday is currently working at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, while on sabbatical leave from his permanent position as an Associate Professor in the Sustainability Cluster at UPES Dehradun. He has more than a decade of teaching experience, during which he has taught various B.Tech. and M.Tech. students. His key areas of interest include water resources modeling, hydroclimatic extremes, game-theoretic and conflict resolution techniques, and watershed management. He is well-versed in statistical modeling and in the programming tools Python, R, and MATLAB. He also has expertise in geospatial software such as ArcGIS and QGIS. He has published high-impact (Q1) research articles, including journal papers, book chapters, and conference proceedings in the area of water quantity and quality. His extensive work serves as a bridge between water quality and water quantity studies.

Prof. Vivek Agarwal
Dr. Vivek Agarwal is an Assistant Professor in Civil Engineering at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. He holds a PhD in Geospatial Environmental Engineering from the University of Nottingham, where his doctoral thesis was recognised with the Best PhD Thesis Award by the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society. He also holds an M.Tech in Geomatics Engineering from IIT Roorkee as a DAAD Scholar. His research expertise spans remote sensing, GIS, InSAR, GRACE satellite gravity data analysis, groundwater dynamics, hydrology, and emerging contaminants including PFAS. His current research integrates NASA GRACE gravity anomaly data with InSAR derived land deformation measurements to investigate spatiotemporal variations in groundwater quantity and quality. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and serves as Editor for Scientific Reports (Nature) and Associate Editor for Oxford Open Climate Change.