Deepankar Choudhury, Ph.D., F.ASCE, an Institute Chair Professor in the Civil Engineering Department at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, in Mumbai, India, has been named a Fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Choudhury’s major research areas are geotechnical earthquake engineering, computational geomechanics, foundation engineering and soil dynamics. His video lectures through NPTEL, Government of India, on “Soil Dynamics” and “Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering” and his web course on “Foundation Engineering” are highly popular. His research has received various awards from IIT.
He is also Adjunct Professor of Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research for CSIR Laboratories India. Throughout his many years of education, he worked as a faculty at IIT Kanpur, the new IITs at Gandhinagar and Dharwad and as a visiting scientist/fellow/faculty at NUS Singapore, UoW Australia, UC Berkeley in the U.S., Kagoshima University in Japan, TU Darmstadt Germany and Incheon National University in South Korea.
As an active member of the ASCE Geo Institute’s Earthquake Engineering and Unsaturated Soils Committees, he organized sessions in various Geo-Congresses. Choudhury is also secretary of the ISSMGE Technical Committee TC-207 on Soil-Structure Interaction and Retaining Walls, and former Secretary of TC-212 on Deep Foundations.
He is currently an associate editor of ASCE’s International Journal of Geomechanics, along with the Indian Geotechnical Journal (Springer) and several other journals. He serves as Editorial Board member for Canada’s Geotechnical Journal, for Geotechnical and Geological Engineering (Springer) and for Geomechanics and Engineering (Techno-Press).
Choudhury’s coauthored textbook, “Foundation Systems for High-Rise Structures,” is very popular, and he has himself produced over 250 technical publications, including some 130 peer-reviewed and highly cited journal articles.
He is India’s only geotechnical engineer who is an elected Fellow of the country’s oldest science academy, namely the National Academy of Sciences, India. Internationally, he is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow of Germany, JSPS Fellow of Japan, and TWAS-VS Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences, Italy, in addition to being a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers India, Indian Geotechnical Society, and Indian Society of Earthquake Technology.
Choudhury received the Prof. C. S. Desai Medal from the International Association for Computer Methods and Analysis in Geomechanics in 2017, IACMAG’s Excellent Regional Contributions Award in 2014 and the Excellent Paper Award (Junior) in 2008 from ASCE’s International Journal of Geomechanics. As well, he has received several Young Scientist/Engineer Awards from various academies/societies of India, such as INSA, NASI, ISCA, INAE, IEI, DST and others, and from abroad, such as from APACM, Shamsher Prakash Research Foundation.
He received an Excellence in Teaching Award from IIT Bombay. He has supervised 23 doctoral theses thus far, and many of his Ph.D. students’ theses have also won Best Ph.D. Thesis awards from IIT Bombay, IGS, INAE and IACMAG.
Choudhury has his BE (Gold Medalist) in civil engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and an ME (Gold Medalist) in civil geotechnical engineering and doctorate in geotechnical earthquake engineering from IISc Bangalore, India.
