Kusala Rajendran

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Kusala Rajendran
കുസലാ രാജെന്ദ്രൻ
CitizenshipIndian
Alma materUniversity of South Carolina, USA IIT, Roorkee
Spouse C. P. Rajendran
Scientific career
FieldsSeismotectonics, paleoseismology, active tectonics
InstitutionsIndian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
Website http://ceas.iisc.ernet.in/~kusala/

Kusala Rajendran is an Indian seismologist and currently a professor at the Centre for Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India. She prefers to call herself an earth scientist. She has primarily worked on earthquakes and their source mechanisms. She has worked extensively on earthquake patterns in India and is considered to be one of the pioneers in this field. [1]

Contents

Research fields

Rajendran has been working in the following areas: [2]

Education and career

Rajendran has completed her Master of Technology in the field of Applied Geophysics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee in 1979. She graduated from University of South Carolina, USA with a Doctor of Philosophy in Seismology in the year 1992. Owing to the growing demand for well qualified seismologists at the time, she returned to India after completing her PhD. Additionally, as her son had become old enough then, she could travel around the world studying earthquakes with greater ease . She has worked extensively in Gujarat, Maharasthra and the Himalayas. She believes that India is a great potential earth science destination, considering that the Himalayas constitute of one of the most active plate collision boundary in the world. She has published around forty research papers in collaboration with her husband C.P. Rajendran, a reputed Indian geologist, over the years. [3] She has led several projects as the principal investigator. Most of her projects are funded by the seismicity program of the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) or the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS). [4]

Rajendran has been a professor at the Center for Earth Sciences, IISc Bengaluru, India since 2007. She develops her own teaching philosophy and methodology as there are hardly any prescribed textbooks in Geophysics for undergraduates. [5] They also work on earthquake recurrence, tsunami recurrence and hazard evaluations. Her work combines field observations and models developed in the lab. For field visits, she usually travels in groups to earthquake prone areas and places that have recently experienced an earthquake. [5]

Family and personal life

Rajendran grew up in a conservative family where the children were usually married off after a bachelor's degree. The only reason the young Kusala, fresh out of her chemistry degree, was sent all the way from Trivandrum, Kerala, to Roorkee, then-Uttar Pradesh, was that her sister was working there. Though she was sent there to do her master's degree in chemistry, a chance encounter with a professor at the IIT-Roorkee campus led Kusala to the field of science that she would come to master over the next thirty years, geophysics. [6] Kusala is married to the Indian geologist C.P. Rajendran. Her son Rahul Pavanan is married to the Tamil actress Abhirami. [7]

Awards

Memberships

Rajendran is a member of various professional and scientific societies: [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seismology</span> Scientific study of earthquakes and propagation of elastic waves through a planet

Seismology is the scientific study of earthquakes and the generation and propagation of elastic waves through the Earth or other planetary bodies. It also includes studies of earthquake environmental effects such as tsunamis as well as diverse seismic sources such as volcanic, tectonic, glacial, fluvial, oceanic microseism, atmospheric, and artificial processes such as explosions and human activities. A related field that uses geology to infer information regarding past earthquakes is paleoseismology. A recording of Earth motion as a function of time, created by a seismograph is called a seismogram. A seismologist is a scientist works in basic or applied seismology.

The 1993 Latur earthquake struck India at 3:56 am local time (UTC+05:30) on 30 September. The main area affected is the districts of Latur and Osmanabad, including the Ausa block of Latur and Omerga of Osmanabad in Maharashtra, Western India. Fifty-two villages were demolished in the intraplate earthquake. It measured 6.2 on the moment magnitude scale, and approximately 10,000 people died, whilst another 30,000 were injured. The earthquake's hypocenter was around 10 km deep – relatively shallow – allowing shock waves to cause more damage. It is considered the deadliest earthquake in the stable continental crust to have occurred in recorded history.

The 1945 Balochistan earthquake occurred in British India at 1:26 PKT on 28 November 1945 with a moment magnitude of 8.1 and a maximum perceived intensity of X (Extreme) on the Mercalli intensity scale.

Kate Hutton, nicknamed the Earthquake Lady, Dr. Kate, or Earthquake Kate, is a former staff seismologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, where she monitored Southern California's earthquake activity for 37 years.

Susan Elizabeth Hough is a seismologist at the United States Geological Survey in Pasadena, California, and scientist in charge of the office. She has served as an editor and contributor for many journals and is a contributing editor to Geotimes Magazine. She is the author of five books, including Earthshaking Science (Princeton).

Susan Y. Schwartz is a scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz known for her research on earthquakes, through field projects conducted in locations in Costa Rica and the San Andreas Fault.

Chittenipattu Puthenveettil Rajendran, also known among his peers as CP, is an Indian geoscientist who has worked mainly on the Indian earthquakes and tectonics.

Harry Oscar Wood (1879–1958) was an American seismologist who made several significant contributions in the field of seismology in the early twentieth-century. Following the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, California, Wood expanded his background of geology and mineralogy and his career took a change of direction into the field of seismology. In the 1920s he co-developed the torsion seismometer, a device tuned to detect short-period seismic waves that are associated with local earthquakes. In 1931 Wood, along with another seismologist, redeveloped and updated the Mercalli intensity scale, a seismic intensity scale that is still in use as a primary means of rating an earthquake's effects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harsh Gupta</span> Indian earth scientist and seismologist (born 1942)

Harsh Kumar Gupta is an Indian earth scientist and seismologist, known for his pioneering work on estimation of reservoir-induced earthquakes. He is a former vice chancellor of the Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT) and a Raja Ramanna Fellow at the National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI), Hyderabad. A recipient of the 1983 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest Indian award in the science and technology category, and the 2008 Waldo E. Smith Award, Gupta was awarded the fourth highest Indian civilian honour of the Padma Shri in 2006.

Krishan Lal Kaila (1932–2003) was an Indian geophysicist and seismologist. Born to a Punjabi Hindu family in Lahore of the British India on 7 September 1932, he was known for his studies on deep seismic soundings (DSS) and was one of the pioneers of the DSS technique in India. His studies covered the tectonic regions of Kadapa, Dharwar Craton, Deccan Traps, and the sedimentary basins of Gujarat and the Himalayas and added to the understanding of the geophysics of the region. His researches have been documented as several peer-reviewed articles; ResearchGate, an online article repository has listed 117 of them. Several authors have cited his works in their work.

Vinod Kumar Gaur is an Indian seismologist,a former director of the National Geophysical Research Institute and an honorary emeritus scientist at CSIR Fourth Paradigm Institute, known for his prediction of the April 2015 Nepal earthquake. He is reported to have conducted extensive studies on the tectonics of the Himalayas and is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India, The World Academy of Sciences, Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences in 1979.

Sankar Kumar Nath is an Indian geophysicist, seismologist and a senior professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. He is known for his geotomographical studies and is an elected fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, Indian Geophysical Union and the National Academy of Sciences, India, The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences in 2002.

Éric Calais is a French geologist-geophysicist, born in 1964, internationally recognized practitioner of high-precision space geodesy and a pioneer in its applications to measure seismic deformations at the boundaries of tectonic plates and in their interiors. He has been a member of the French Academy of Sciences since 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Main Himalayan Thrust</span> Geological feature

The Main Himalayan Thrust (MHT) is a décollement under the Himalaya Range. This thrust fault follows a NW-SE strike, reminiscent of an arc, and gently dips about 10 degrees towards the north, beneath the region. It is the largest active continental megathrust fault in the world.

Anne Meltzer is a seismologist known for her research on earthquakes and the formation of mountain ranges. Her research primarily focused on the evolution of the Earth's lithosphere and the surface processes associated with faulting and deformation in the Earth's crust. Through her own personal research and collaboration with other colleagues, she strived to make advancements in the efficiency and effectiveness of monitoring earthquakes. In addition, her work aimed to effectively reduce earthquake destruction in countries that experience frequent seismic phenomena.

Ruth Harris is a scientist at the United States Geological Survey known for her research on large earthquakes, especially on how they begin, end, and cause the ground to shake. In 2019, Harris was elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union who cited her "for outstanding contributions to earthquake rupture dynamics, stress transfer, and triggering".

The 1850 Xichang earthquake rocked Sichuan Province of Qing China on September 12. The earthquake which caused major damage in Xichang county had an estimated moment magnitude of 7.3–7.9 Mw  and a surface wave magnitude of 7.5–7.7 Ms . An estimated 20,650 people died.

The 1803 Garhwal earthquake occurred in the early morning of September 1 at 01:30 local time. The estimated 7.8-magnitude-earthquake had an epicenter in the Garhwal Himalaya near Uttarkashi, British India. Major damage occurred in the Himalaya and Indo-Gangetic Plain, with the loss of between 200 and 300 lives. It is among the largest Himalaya earthquakes of the 19th-century, caused by thrust faulting.

William L. Ellsworth is an American seismologist who is a research faculty member at Stanford University. His research covers a range of topics of earthquake science focusing on the physics of earthquake nucleation, earthquake hazard assessment, and active fault processes as studied through earthquakes. He is the 2021 recipient of the Harry Fielding Reid medal, the highest honor of the Seismological Society of America.

References

  1. ↑ Vishnoi, Anubhuti (28 April 2015). "Nepal Earthquake: Strong possibility of quake in Central Himalayas; Himachal Pradesh in high strain region, say experts". The Economic Times. Retrieved 12 January 2019.
  2. ↑ "Homepage at CEaS". Archived from the original on 8 December 2016. Retrieved 5 February 2017.
  3. ↑ TLoS (29 February 2016). "Finding "Faults" with Kusala Rajendran". The Life of Science. Retrieved 4 February 2017.
  4. ↑ "Research group studying earthquakes and other disasters". Science Media Center @ IISc. Archived from the original on 4 February 2017. Retrieved 4 February 2017.
  5. 1 2 "Research group studying earthquakes and other disasters | Science Media Center @ IISc". iisc.researchmedia.center. Archived from the original on 4 February 2017. Retrieved 4 February 2017.
  6. ↑ njinxs (29 February 2016). "Finding "Faults" with Kusala Rajendran". The Life of Science. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
  7. ↑ Soman, Deepa (10 February 2014). "Times of India".
  8. 1 2 3 4 "About Us". ceas.iisc.ernet.in. Archived from the original on 31 March 2017. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
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