I am a geologist and paleoclimatologist with over two decades of research experience in reconstructing long-term climate change and active tectonics using cave archives and geological proxies. My work spans the Indian and Nepal Himalaya, the Andaman Islands, and the Eastern and Western seaboards of India, addressing questions that sit at the intersection of Earth science, water security, and natural hazard assessment. My primary research tools are paleolakes and speleothems – the secondary carbonate formations that grow inside caves over thousands of years, silently recording rainfall patterns, temperature shifts, monsoon fluctuations, earthquake events, and even tsunamis. I have spent over twenty years collecting, dating, and deciphering the geological archives from lakes to caves across the central and western Himalaya, building some of the most detailed Holocene climate records available from the Indian subcontinent. This work has been supported by multiple national fellowships from the Department of Science and Technology and the Board of Research in Nuclear Sciences, Government of India. I am the author of 40+ peer-reviewed and contributed publications and a co-author of an Elsevier Book, Neotectonism in Indian Subcontinent: Landscape Evolution (2017), with the Late Prof. K.S. Valdiya. My fieldwork has taken me across four continents, from the Austrian Alps and the Carpathians to Laos, Oman, and the Rockies, and I bring that breadth of geological perspective to every problem I study.

Beyond the laboratory and the field, I am deeply committed to science communication and outreach, because I believe that science belongs to everyone. I have delivered lectures and hands-on training programs for students across rural India, from the remote villages to urban colleges, translating the language of rocks, caves, and climate into stories that resonate with young minds. I actively mentor graduate and postgraduate students, with a particular focus on empowering women in STEM. I have also engaged with the public through media interviews and social platforms, making the science of caves, their role in climate records, earthquake history, and freshwater resources, accessible to a much wider audience. I believe that a scientist’s responsibility does not end at the publishing scientific papers. It extends to the student in the rural schools who deserves to understand why the spring near their home is drying up, why the mountain shakes, and why the rock beneath their feet holds the memory of ancient oceans. Through my outreach work, I am popularising geological sciences as a way of reconnecting people with the natural world around them, because geology is not an abstract discipline confined to laboratories. It is the story of the ground we walk on, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the landscapes that shape our cultures and livelihoods. I share with students and communities how rocks are not just stones but living archives of Earth’s history, how a single cave formation can tell us about droughts that toppled civilisations, and how understanding the planet’s past is our most powerful tool for protecting its future. My goal is simple: to help people see science in every small thing around them, in a pebble by the river, in the colour of a hillside, in the taste of spring water and in doing so, to build a deeper, more instinctive love for the Earth we all share.