Dr. Sunil Bajpai

Prof. Sunil Bajpai is currently senior professor at Department of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. From 2013 to 2018, Prof. Bajpai also served as Director of the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences (BSIP), Lucknow– a national institute under the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India.

Prof Bajpai’s research interests lie mainly in vertebrate paleontology. He has and his team have worked on diverse groups of vertebrate fossils in India that mainly range in age from Middle Jurassic time (about 165 million-year BP) to Miocene about 10 million-year BP. His fossil discoveries have established the importance of the Indian landmass in tracing the origins, evolution, paleobiogeography of several vertebrate groups including marine mammals such as whales and sea-cows, land mammals such as horses and primates, and reptiles such as snakes and dinosaurs. His recent discoveries, which include the 47 million-year old giant fossil snake Vasuki indicus in Gujarat have garnered widespread international and national media attention. Prof Bajpai has authored 160 publications including many in top-tier journals like Nature, PNAS and Science. Among the many assignments and fellowships held by Prof Bajpai are the Smithsonian post-doctoral fellowship, Washington DC, JSPS Fellowship in Japan, Commonwealth Fellowship in UCL, London etc.

In recognition of his research contributions, he was elected as a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He is also a recipient of the National Geosciences Award from the Ministry of Mines, and the National Award for Excellence in Geosciences & Technology from the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India. Most recently, he was awarded the highly prestigious J.C. Bose Grant in recognition of his research contributions. He is also currently the Chairman of the Research Advisory Committee of Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun.