Dr. Devendra Narain Singh FNAE, F.ASCE
Institute Chair Professor
Department of Civil Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Mumbai, India
Dr. D. N. Singh was born in 1965 at Shahjahanpur, UP, India. He has been a faculty member of Civil Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, since 1994. Before joining IIT Bombay he has served Central Road Research Institute, New Delhi, and Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, for short durations. His early education was completed at Lucknow, UP, India. He obtained his bachelor’s, masters and Doctoral degrees from IIT Kanpur in 1986, 1989 and 1993, respectively.
His teaching, and research and developmental activities are in quite diversified areas of geotechnical engineering (viz., soil mechanics, foundation engineering, environmental geotechnology, mechanics of unsaturated soils, soil characterization based on thermal and electrical properties, contaminant transport in porous media, mineralogical characterization, utilization and recycling of industrial waste, geotechnical centrifuge modeling, etc.). He has published 240 technical articles of which 161 are in the refereed journals. He has supervised 25 Doctoral (and 11 ongoing) and 31 Masters (and 2 ongoing) theses. In addition, he has supervised one German Post-doctoral fellow, under the DAAD fellowship scheme, and four French Undergraduate students, under ESTP-IITB exchange program, for their final year projects. He has been successful in filing 15 patents as well.
Apart from teaching and research, Dr. Singh has been very actively associated with some of the most prestigious business houses, as an in-house instructor and retainer consultant. Some of these organizations are Reliance, Indian Petrochemicals Ltd., MAERSK, Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT), City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) Mumbai etc. He has been a member of two committees constituted by the Department of Science and Technology, New Delhi, and is an expert for TIFAC, Mission REACH monitoring committees, since 2001. He has taken up sponsored projects from Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), Department of Science and Technology (DST-TIFAC), All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) and Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB). With financial aids received from these and several other organizations, he has established a state-of-the-art Environmental Geotechnology Laboratory in the department.
Recently he has launched a new international journal and has assumed the role of Editor-in-chief, Environmental Geotechnics, ICE Publishing, London, UK. He had been one of the Editors of the Indian Geotechnical Journal and is presently a Editorial Board Member of International Journal of Geomechanics, ASCE, Geomechanics and Geoengineering: An International Journal, Geotechnical testing Journal, ASTM, Korean Society of Civil Engineering (KSCE) Journal of Civil Engineering, Geomechanics and Engineering (GAE), International Journal of Geotechnical Engineering, International Scholarly Research Network (ISRN) Civil Engineering, Acta Geotechnica Slovenica and Indian Geotechnical Journal. He has been a reviewer to 47 international Journals.
He has been a guest editor of special volumes of several international journals (KSCE, Journal of Civil Engineering: Advances in Geomechanics, International Journal of Geotechnical Engineering: Geomechanics in the Emerging Social and Technological Age, Ground Improvement: Contemporary Issues in Ground Improvement Techniques, Geotechnical and Geological Engineering: Characterization of Unsaturated Soils, Geotechnical Testing Journal, ASTM International: Recent Developments in Geotechnical Testing, International Journal of Geoengineering Case Histories, International Journal of Geomechanics: (a) Environmental Geotechnology-Contemporary Issues, (b) Material and Computer Modeling and (c) Rock Mechanics and CO2 Sequestration, Journal of Advances in Civil Engineering: (a) Advances in Instrumentation and Monitoring in Geotechnical Engineering and (b) Computational Geomechanics).
He is recipient of Young teachers’ award instituted by the AICTE, New Delhi and 2003 SP Research Award instituted by Shamsher Prakash Foundation, Rolla, MO, USA for his research contributions in Environmental Geotechnology and Mechanics of Unsaturated soils.
He is the recipient of JUNIOR/SENIOR Paper Award from the International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics (IACMAG) for the year 2005. He was the Chairman, 12th IACMAG, GOA, India, 1-6 October 2008 and was awarded Appreciation Award 2008, “For the outstanding, highly successful and unique organization of the 12th IACMAG Conference in Goa, India, with meritorious efforts, perseverance and efficiency”. He is recipient of Excellent Contributions Award 2008, which is given by the IACMAG to individuals who have a record of significant contributions in research, academic activities and professional service in different regions of the globe.
He is recipient of John R. Booker Excellence Award-2011, which is given by the IACMAG for advancement of research, education and practice of Environmental Geotechnology and development of novel techniques to simulate contaminant transport in geomaterials, under laboratory and in-situ conditions. He is recipient of Richard Feynman Prize 2014, for the best paper published by the ICE journal.
He has been invited to join the Innovation and Development Committee of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE), which will be the think tank of the society. The role of this committee will simply be to think and come up with new ideas which will invigorate the society and bring further excitement to being a member of ISSMGE.
He is: Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering, New Delhi and Fellow of American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
