I am an IGERT affiliate, which means I have many of the academic privileges as IGERT fellows, except that i am ineligible for financial support from the program. Money or no money-- this has been a great program and I am looking forward to my remaining time with both the old and newer cohorts.

As for my educational background, I started in the Geography department at SUNY-Buffalo as a PhD candidate in Fall 2000, right after finishing a Bachelor's degree in Geological Sciences from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, (India). My broad focus since then has been to research how GIScience can help geophysical modeling of natural phenomena. In the last four years I have worked on many projects with civil engineers, mechanical engineers, geologists, hydrologists, chemists, mathematicians and even public interest groups. These associations have helped me identify many limitations of current geographic information systems many of which I hope to address in my academic career in the next few years. In the last year or so I have been teaching myself spatial statistics and have written a couple of papers on its applications in epidemiology and contamination studies. In the final (hopefully!) phase of my life as a graduate student, I have become very interested in ontology and its use in describing landscapes and geomorphological features for facilitating both communication of geographic information and scientific inquiry of geophysical processes.

I expect to finish my PhD soon and keep publishing papers in many diverse areas of research that hopefully somebody, someday, somewhere will read and benefit from!