Groundwater hydrology and management

Pennan Chinnasamy is an Associate Professor with the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IITB) - India, with the Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas (CTARA), and associate faculty with the Interdisciplinary Program on Climate Sciences (IDPCS), Centre for Policy Sciences (CPS) and Centre for Machine Intelligence and Data  Science (CMINDS) departments. He is also an Adjunct Professor with University of Missouri (USA), University of Nebraska (USA), and Oulu University (Finland), working extensively on global water issues and data models. 

Pennan received his BSc in Physics from University of Madras, India, followed by a double Masters in Physics from Bhrathidasan University (India) and Wesleyan University (Connecticut, USA). He obtained his PhD from the School of Natural Resources at the University of Missouri. He then worked as a Research fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (India), as a Researcher at the International Water Management Institute (Nepal), followed by a Senior Researcher position at the Nanyang Water and Energy Institute (Singapore), before joining   IITB.

Pennan teaches graduate courses on Natural resources management (water, soil, agriculture, etc.), GIS, Remote Sensing and Big Data tools and also mentors graduate and PhD students. He is the founding director of the Rural Data Research and Analysis (RuDRA) lab, which is the first Big data lab dedicated for rural regions, housed in IIT. At RuDRA Pennan, along with his NGO collaborators, collects and hosts large data for holistic management of rural resources and to understand hidden trends and classifications using Big Data tools, including AI and Machine Learning. In addition, at RuDRA a host of satellite imagery are used for augmenting observed data for better management plans. 

Over the past decade, Pennan has experience working in NGOs, national and regional government agencies and academic institutions, focusing on sustainable surface and groundwater management plans, climate change impacts, large data analysis and hydrological simulation models. His work has been recognized in many internationally peer reviewed journals, policy briefs and government reports (e.g. EPA, NEA- Nepal, World Bank, Asian Development Bank) and are being used to formulate scientifically validated best management plans. He also serves as an advisor for Government of Tamil Nadu and Government of Kerala, and Ministry of Science and Technology (Gov of India) as a committee member for promoting Geospatial Data and Geospatial Policy.