Dr. Prosenjit Ghosh (Assistant Professor)

It is difficult to understand the ways in which earth’s climate responds to the combined influences of greenhouse gases, variability in the sun’s rays and cloud cover, and other factors. Reconstruction of past climate plays an important role in providing examples of ways in which Earth's climate has responded in the past to these factors.For many years, earth scientists have tried to reconstruct past climates using the distributions of isotopes between seawater and carbonate fossils, like corals and shelly planktonic organisms.
These methods have provided great insight into the ice ages in the geologically recent past. These have failed to provide meaningful constraints on the relatively warm climates of the deep geological past,the times that could potentially inform our understanding of a world warmed by greenhouse gases. Dr. Prosenjit Ghosh primary research interest is to understand long term variation of regional and global climate. During post doctoral time at California Institute of technology he proposed and established a new approach to reconstructing past climate; one that examines the extents to which rare isotopes bond with one another in fossil carbonates.This method can be used to determine surface temperatures hundreds of millions of years ago, and has shown a relationship between exceptionally warm climates and times of high atmospheric CO2. Clumped isotope method is now been actively pursued by Earth Science researcher at IISc under his supervision.

Professional profile

Assistant Professor: Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan (2006-2007).
Postdoctoral fellow (Nov, 2003 - Nov 2006) California Institute for Technology,
Pasadena, California, U.S.A.
Postdoctoral fellow (June, 2002- Nov, 2003) Max Planck Institute for
Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany.
Postdoctoral fellow (April, 2000- March, 2002) Physical Research Laboratory,
Ahmedabad, India

Education

PhD in Physics (2000), Physical Research Laboratory/ Devi Ahilaya Vishwa vidyalaya, Indore, India..