Prof. Sachchida Nand Tripathi
Has been appointed as the Inaugural (First) Dean of the School.
Prof. Sachchida Nand Tripathi is the inaugural Dean of Kotak School of Sustainability at IIT Kanpur anda Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and the Department of Sustainable Energy Engineering.
In the past decade, Prof Tripathi has undertaken seminal work in developing state-of-the-art air quality monitoring and management technologies in India. He is credited with implementing the largest sensor-based air quality network in India, which has resulted in several cities of India starting to adopt this technology to improve decision making. His work has directly impacted policy making at the national level, while continuing to guide over 20 PhD thesis and mentored several successful startups who have gone on to become market leaders. Prof Tripathi's broad area of work in atmospheric sciences includes aerosol-induced cloud invigoration effect, regional climate changes, AI/ML-enabled dynamic hyper-local source apportionment and low-cost sensor-based air quality monitoring. He is leading the Government of India approved Centre of Excellence for Air Quality Monitoring technologies (ATMAN), which has already developed new hardware and AI/ML-based analytical techniques which are being used by several states and cities of India.
In October 2024, Prof Tripathi successfully led a consortium of over 20 faculty members from 4 Institutes and 5 large industry partners to be selected for the first ever Government of India-funded "Artificial Intelligence Centre of Excellence (AI CoE) for Sustainable Cities" whose initial mandate has been focused on bringing AI-technologies to energy, air quality, urban mobility and sustainable technologies for waste management. Prof Tripathi is the Project Director of the AI CoE for Sustainable Cities and is engaged in driving the research as well as the impact of these technologies in Indian cities. The team led by Prof Tripathi is developing AI-technologies for optimizing household energy demands in a city of 18 million residents, building real-time air quality monitoring and policy evaluation technologies for air pollution mitigation actions at the city and national level, digital twins for reducing vehicular emissions and improving public transit systems and Drone and vision-based AI-technologies for waste management in Indian cities.
In recognition of his significant contributions, Prof. Tripathi has been honoured with numerous awards in Physical Science as well as in Engineering. He is the recipient of Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award, J C Bose National Fellowship and Infosys Prize 2023 in Engineering and Computer Science. He is an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) and National Academy of Sciences of India (NASI), and recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus award of Banaras Hindu University. He currently also holds the Sir M. Visvesvaraya Chair Professorship at the institute. He obtained his BTech from IIT BHU in Civil Engineering in 1992, MTech in Environmental Engineering from MNIT-Allahabad in 1995 and PhD in Atmospheric Physics from University of Reading, UK in 2001. After a brief stint of post-doctoral research at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and University of Oxford, Prof. Tripathi joined IIT Kanpur as faculty in 2003.
