Bio

Somnath Baidya Roy is a Professor at the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences (CAS) at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He also holds the Rockefeller Foundation Climate Science and Technology Chair position. Somnath received his PhD at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA. He joined IIT Delhi after spending almost two decades in the US academia as a post-doc at Princeton University, a Research Associate at Duke University, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Somnath is the Dean (Planning) of IIT Delhi. He is an Editor of Earth System Dynamics, a leading journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU), and a co-convenor of Energy Meteorology at the EGU General Assembly. He is a Founding Director of Tensor Dynamics, a weather and climate analytics start-up. He is a Scientifc Advisor to a start-up and an incubator. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Atal Incubation Centre at IIT Delhi.

Somnath's primary research area is modeling land-atmosphere interactions, where he builds and uses models to study the effects of vegetation dynamics and land-use/land-cover change like deforestation and agriculture on regional weather and climate. This work has implications for regional climate change, food security, biological carbon sequestration, and carbon accounting. He also works on renewable energy meteorology, including resource assessment, forecasting, and impact assessment for the wind and solar energy sectors. Somnath's research has been funded by US NSF, NASA, ISRO, DRDO, SERB, and a number of private corporations. He also provides advisory services to government and private entities on climate, forestry, renewable energy, and net-zero issues.