Raj Bhagat Palanichamy is a Manager in the Sustainable Cities program of World Resources Institute-India. He is a post graduate from Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (Indian Space Research Organization) and The University of Twente, The Netherlands where his research was specialized on Earth Observation and Geo-Informatics. He holds a graduate degree in Civil Engineering from St.Xavier’s Catholic College of Engineering which is affiliated to Anna University, Chennai.
With a background in GIS, Remote Sensing, and Civil Engineering, Raj supports multiple projects of WRI India in the fields of Urban Development, Water Resources, and Transport since 2015. He has been actively doing research around the spatio-temporal variations and patterns of various geophysical and anthropogenic phenomena such as precipitation, vegetation, temperature, urbanization, surface water, and gravitational anomalies over South Asia.
Beyond spatio-temporal analytics, Raj has also been involved in creating multiple models using machine learning and big data to predict urbanization in India. His research in these fields are used to inform local, state and union governments in various issues and has been assisting them to adopt data-driven approaches in their planning processes through capacity building.
Raj’s current portfolio of projects includes monitoring and understanding the characteristics of Urbanization in India, their effects on ecosystems, flood simulation models for forecasting and planning, automated systems for monitoring quantity and quality aspects of surface water, and a tool for cities’ water assessment. Of late, Raj has also been taking spatial data and analysis to social media to create public awareness in these fields.
