Dr. Ram
Ray is
a professor at Prairie View A&M University. He holds a Ph.D. in
Civil Engineering, an M.S. degree in Soil Science, and a B.S. degree in Civil
Engineering. He has more than eight years of working experience as faculty and research
scientist at Prairie View A&M University and over ten years as an engineer
in the federal government. Ray’s research interests include climate smart
agriculture, carbon sequestration, and climate change Hydrology-land
surface-atmosphere interactions, soil water dynamics, watershed hydrology and
modeling. He has authored one book, several book chapters
and articles in peer-reviewed journals. He has been invited for
several training and speeches around the globe. He is an editor and editorial
board member of several journals, including Agronomy, Agricultural and
Environmental Letters, Remote Sensing in Earth System Sciences, Remote Sensing,
Sustainability, and Civil Engineering and Constructions.
Dr. Venkatesh Balan earned a B.Sc. in 1989 and an M.Sc. in 1991 from Madras University. He received his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1999. From 1999 to 2001, he served as a postdoctoral fellow at Osaka University. From 2001 to 2002, he worked as a scientist at the Oji paper company. From 2002 to 2004, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the AIST. From 2005 to 2017, he served as a Research Associate Professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Material Science at Michigan State University (UH). From 2017 to 2022, he served as an assistant professor, and since 2022, he has been serving as an associate professor at the Department of Engineering Technology, University of Houston. His research expertise includes producing microbial products from algae and fungus, fuels, and chemicals from lignocellulosic biomass using pretreatment, enzyme hydrolysis, and microbial fermentation. Dr. Balan was the recipient of the CSIR fellowship from the Government of India in 1992. He received two prestigious fellowships in Japan from the JSPS in t 1999 and 2022 for a 4-year postdoctoral position in Japan. He received a research excellence award and a teaching excellence award given by the UH College of Technology in 2019 and 2020, respectively. He was the recipient of the ‘Advanced Materials Award’ from the International Association of Advanced Materials, Sweden in January 2024, and the USDA E. Kika De La Garza Fellowship in May 2024.
Dr. Sandeep Kumar is a professor and Department Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA. He is the Director of the Biomass Research Laboratory (BRL). He is a Section Board Member of the journal Sustainability and an Editorial Board Member of the journal Biomass at MDPI. His research interests mainly focus on biofuels, biomass, supercritical fluids, subcritical and supercritical water, and hydrothermal and reaction engineering. His scientific output includes 70 publications in various journals with an h-index of 24 (Scopus, January 2024).
