Abhijit Mukherjee (earth scientist)

Abhijit Mukherjee is an Indian professor, scientist and currently Professor of Geology and Geophysics and the School of Environmental Science and Engineering of IIT Kharagpur. He has been selected for Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2020 in the field of Earth Atmosphere Ocean and Planetary Sciences.

Abhijit Mukherjee presently works as an associate professor at the Department of Geology and Geophysics and the School of Environmental Science and Engineering of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)Kharagpur. Presently, He has also been the Associate Editor/Editorial Board of Scientific Reports (Nature), ES&T Engineering (ACS), Groundwater for Sustainable Development (Elsevier) and Journal of Earth System Sciences (Springer Nature). Previously, he has also served in Editorial role in Journal of Hydrology (Elsevier) and Applied Geochemistry (Elsevier).  He is well known for his contribution in the field of Groundwater Geology or Hydrogeology.

Mukherjee's main research areas are physical, chemical and isotope hydrogeology, including numerical flow modeling, computation, contaminant transport, water policy applications. He is globally known for his studies on geological and human-sourced groundwater pollution (e.g. arsenic, fluoride, sanitation-borne and emerging contaminants) in more than a dozen countries. He also specializes in groundwater-surface water interactions. In India, this work has provided input to the government in understanding country's drinking water and food security. He has also done extensive work on groundwater quantity and scarcity by understanding decadal-scale groundwater storage changes over the Indian subcontinent by using advanced computation and Artificial Intelligence techniques. Mukherjee also leads one of South Asia's first Urban Geoscience project in the ancient city of Varanasi in 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 2020.