Chandrasekhar Annavarapu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at IIT Madras. He worked as a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) – a Department of Energy research facility in Livermore, CA, USA. He also worked at ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company in Houston, TX, USA as a computational scientist. Dr. Annavarapu’s research expertise is in computational mechanics. His research focuses on addressing the limitations of finite element methods for complex and evolving interface problems in mechanics such as crack surfaces and material boundaries, and also on advancing numerical algorithms to model the process of hydraulic fracturing as a multi-physics process

Abhijit Chaudhuri is a Professor in the Department of Applied Mechanics at IIT Madras. His research broadly focusses in the field of Transport processes in porous media and Water waves. His research group works on geo-thermal heat extraction, viscous instabilities during polymer and surfactant flooding, CO2 sequestration by dissolution and structural trapping, numerical modelling of coupled THMC processes during gas hydrate dissociation induced deformation, and in development of reverse osmosis in rotor dynamic system for desalination.