Vineet K. Gahalaut, Ph.D., is Chief Scientist at CSIR-National Geophysical Research Institute, Hyderabad, India. He did his masters and Ph.D. from the University of Roorkee (now IIT Roorkee) in geophysics in the year 1989 and 1995, respectively. He has also served as Director of National Center for Seismology, Ministry of Earth Sciences, New Delhi (from 2015–2019). He is involved in research related to earthquake processes, tectonic geodesy, seismology, and geodynamics. His research work mainly focusses on plate convergence, strain accumulation, earthquake occurrence processes in the plate interior and plate boundary regions of the Indian plateau. He has more than 150 research publications in peer reviewed journals and is Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bengaluru, and Indian National Science Academy, Delhi, India.M. Rajeevan, Ph.D., is Distinguished Scientist at the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), the Government of India. He did his masters and Ph.D. in physics from Madurai Kamaraj University in 1983 and from the University of Pune in 1997, respectively. He has served the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), India Meteorological Department (IMD), National Atmospheric Research Laboratory (NARL), and Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, before he became the Secretary at the MoES in December 2015. His expertise includes monsoon variability and monsoon prediction, climate change and extreme weather events. He made significant contributions in developing many application tools and prediction models for societal applications like monsoon seasonal prediction models, gridded climate data sets and climate application products for regional climate services. He has more than 150 research papers to his credit published in several peer reviewed journals. He is Fellow of all the three science academies of India and also an academician of the International Academy of Astronautics. He is an expert member in the Research Board of WorldMeteorological Organization (WMO).
