Biswajeet Pradhan

Biswajeet Pradhan (born May 20, 1975) is a spatial scientist, modeler, author and who is now working as a Distinguished Professor and the founding Director of the Centre for Advanced Modelling and Geospatial Information Systems (CAMGIS.) in the School of Information, Systems and Modelling at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. He is working primarily in the fields of remote sensing, Geographic information system, complex modelling and their application to Natural hazard, Natural resource and environmental problems. Many of his research outputs were put into practice. The platform of his research is mainly Asia and Australia, but he has been sharing his findings to all over the world. He is also a permanent resident of Australia and Malaysia. 
== Education ==
Dr. Pradhan received his Bachelor of Science (Hons.) from the Berhampur University in Odisha, India, in 1995. Then, he furthered his studies at the Indian Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India. There, he was awarded a Master of Science in Remote Sensing/Applied Geology, in 1998. Later, he was awarded Master of Technology in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India and TU Dresden, Germany. He was awarded a PhD in 2006 in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Geomatics Engineering from the Universiti Putra Malaysia, and within twelve years, he was promoted from postdoc to lecturer to professor in a career that spanned three countries: India, Malaysia and Germany. In 2011, he was awarded a Habilitation qualification in Remote Sensing from TU Dresden, the highest academic qualification a person can achieve in Germany. 
== Early career (1998-2010) ==
Pradhan started his career as a Research Scientist with research and teaching workloads at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and at Dresden University of Technology (TU-Dresden), Germany from 1998 to 2002 serving for 2 years consecutively in each institution. In 2002, he was employed as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Civil Engineering, Asian Institute of Medicine, Science and Technology, Malaysia. Here he was involved in teaching and researching activities on new compression algorithms for laser scanning data. From 2005 to 2007, he was the Senior Manager at Cilix Corporation, Malaysia, where he undertook research and supervised R&D projects for the Malaysian Centre for Remote Sensing under the Ministry of Science and Technology. Concurrently in 2007, he joined UPM as a research associate at the Institute of Advanced Technology. In 2008, he was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship and spent two years at TU-Dresden (Germany) where he undertook research to develop geospatial modelling tools for landslide hazard and risk assessment.
== Career in Malaysia and Australia (2011- till date) ==
Dr. Pradhan has been an active researcher and university professor (full), actively supervising postgraduate students and projects, and he is on a rising curve in publishing research papers since 1998. 
In 2010, Dr. Pradhan joined the University of Putra Malaysia (UPM) as Associate Professor and was promoted to a Full Professor in 2017. He was also the Principal Researcher at Geospatial Information Science Research Centre (GISRC), UPM. 
Since September 2017, Dr. Pradhan is a research-only academic at the University of Technology Sydney. He is the founding director of the Centre for Advanced Modelling and Geospatial Information Systems (CAMGIS). Dr. Pradhan leads a multi-disciplinary research at CAMGIS focusing on advanced spatial modelling, remote sensing, artificial intelligence (AI) applied to natural hazards and other environmental and urban problems.
== Achievements ==
Dr. Pradhan has a record of outstanding research outputs appropriate to his discipline. He has been consistently ranked in the world's top 1% of Computer Science researchers for each year in the past three years (HighlyCited.com, Clarivate Analytics) and is the most prolific contributor to publications in the fields of GIS, remote sensing and landslides (Scopus, Elsevier). His record of achievement and productivity is impressive: 380 journal papers, 8 international books, 14 book chapters in remote sensing, 240 conference proceedings and 3 edited proceedings. His research is frequently published in the top journals in his discipline including Landslides (journal)|Landslides, CATENA and Remote Sensing. His h-index is 75 and his publications have accumulated 18,284 citations (Google Scholar)
Dr. Pradhan has a respected international standing and is held in high regard. He has received over 50 awards or honours for his contributions to teaching, service and research since 2006, the most recent being the 2018 World Class Professor Award by the Indonesian Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education. In 2017, he was awarded with the Research Star Award by the Malaysian Ministry of Education. In recognition of his research excellence and important contributions to remote sensing and GIS, he was nominated as an Ambassador Scientist for the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany) to oversee research and networking opportunities between Germany and southeast Asian countries. He has been an invited keynote speaker and forum panel member for remote sensing scientific events both internationally and nationally on several occasions, and is a member of a number of editorial boards of Institute for Scientific Information|ISI journals such as Journal of Mountain Science, Journal of Sensors, Landslides, Sensors, Remote Sensing, Geomatics, Natural Hazards and Risk, Arabian Journal of Geosciences, Open Geosciences, Complex and Intelligent Systems, Korean Journal of Remote Sensing, and Earth Systems and Environment
He has also contributed to other scientific works such as (i) subject matter expert, Malaysian Higher Education Leadership Academy (AYRC-AKEPT) where he contributed to a scientific report for the Ministry of Higher Education (Malaysia)|Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education, 2012; (ii) played an active role for the Department of Mineral and Geosciences, Malaysia where he contributed to the National Landslide Hazard and Risk Project, since 2014; (iii) grant reviewer for several international funding agencies e.g. European Science Foundation (ESF), Research Councils UK|Research Council UK (RCUK), Austrian Science Fund (Austria), Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research - Wikipedia|Dutch Science Council (Netherlands), Belgian Remote Sensing Program, Kazakhstan National Centre for Science & Technology Evaluation (Kazakhstan), and Saudi Geological Survey (Saudi Arabia).
Category:1975 births
Category:Indian space scientists
Category:Indian authors
Category:Indian academics