Dr. Sandeep Kumar is a scientist (Agronomy) at the ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, Regional Station, Karnal, India. He is working on enhancing resource use efficiencies in conservation agriculture-based rice-wheat systems for sustainable crop production. He has published 8 books with Springer, Elsevier and national publishers as editor and author as well. He has edited several special issues in MDPI and Frontier having impact factors up to 5.0. Currently, he is an active reviewer of various highly reputed journals, e.g., Sustainability, Agriculture, Agricultural Water Management, Soil and Tillage, European Journal of Agronomy, Plant and Soil, PLOS One and many others. He has received numerous prestigious national awards, including Young Scientist, Best Paper Awards, Best Research Scholar, and Best Master’s Thesis awards. Dr. Meena was born into a farming family and is working in the Department of Agronomy at IAS, BHU, Varanasi. With an excellent academic background, he has been elected a fellow of several academies, including the National Academy of Sciences, India (NASI), the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS), the National Academy of Biological Sciences (NABS), the Indian Society of Agronomy (ISA), and the Society for Rapeseed-Mustard Research (SRMR). The Ministry of Education has also awarded him the Raman Fellowship for the USA under World Food Prize Laureate Prof. Rattan Lal, and he was an INSA visiting scientist at ISARC-IRRI. Additionally, he has been listed among the world's 2% of scientists for his career. He guided 8 PhD, 29 master’s and completed 10 externally funded projects from IRRI, IoE-BHU, SERB-DST, ICAR, MOE, and GOI. Dr. He has made significant research contributions to natural resource management and to farm and industrial waste recycling for soil health. Dr. Meena evaluates energy flow, atmospheric CO2 capture, carbon credit and auditing, and eco-friendly techniques for a sustainable food system and soil regeneration, as evidenced by high-impact publications and extension work at the farmer level. He has published extensively, with an H-index of 76, an I-10 index of 222, and 17,250 citations. His work is crucial for understanding the long-term stability of soil carbon, which enhances soil microbial and nutrient dynamics in rice-based diversified cropping systems. He trained farmers from the Deep Forest Tribe to adopt climate-smart practices to secure their livelihoods under the DST-SEED grant project. Dr. Meena has also contributed to the agricultural extension activities in the “Honourable Prime Minister of India villages. His future work aims to reduce soil organic carbon oxidation and enhance its stability in agroecosystems, enabling farmers to benefit from carbon credits and generate additional income.
