Dr Soukat Kumar Das joined NIT Rourkela in June 2023 as a faculty member in the Dept of Civil Engg. He has more than 8 years of research experience in the field of granular mechanics, Discrete Element Method (DEM), ground improvement techniques and constitutive modelling of geomaterials. His current research area includes understanding the potential of carbon sequestration in the Indian peninsula and developing closed-loop geothermal systems. Before joining NIT Rourkela, he worked as a postdoc at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST, KSA), where he worked on understanding the effect of drill string vibrations on wellbore stabilities. He completed his PhD from IIT Kanpur in 2021, and the major focus of his doctoral work was to decipher the effect of crushing on the rate-dependent response of granular media. He got his Masters from IIT Roorkee in 2015. His Undergraduate degree is from Jadavpur University in Civil Engg (2013).