Gavendra Pandey

Research Associate, Center for Environmental Modeling for Policy Development

Biography

Gavendra Pandey is a research associate in the Institute for the Environment at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC IE). Before joining UNC IE in March 2020, he served as a senior project scientist in the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, India. He also served as a senior research fellow in LMEE at the University of Evry, France (under the Indo-French Centre for the Promotion of Advanced Research (IFCPAR/CEFIPRA) project). He holds a postgraduate degree in applied mathematics from IIT Roorkee, India, and a Ph.D. degree from IIT Delhi, India. Pandey’s Ph.D. work analyzed the multiple source dispersion and the coupling of the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (U.S. EPA) regulatory model AERMOD with the source identification algorithm, which enhances the potential applicability of this model. Pandey is an air pollutant dispersion modeler with interests in the broad topics of atmospheric and applied mathematical sciences such as air-quality modeling, inverse modeling, aircraft dispersion modeling and data science. He has published extensively in these research areas in peer-reviewed journals. Pandey was awarded by the prestigious Prof. M.P. Singh award for doing quality research during his Ph.D. degree in India. Currently, at UNC IE, he is leading the development of a new dispersion model for aircraft sources, on a project funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration. He and his team have developed a plume rise algorithm for aircraft emissions during landing and take-off (LTO) cycle and implemented this algorithm into the AERMOD (v22112) regulatory model for the next public release. He and his team have also proposed a modified meteorological approach to account for the shoreline and urban effects in the AERMOD’s meteorological preprocessor AERMET.

Education

Ph.D., Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT), India

Postgraduate Degree, Applied Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT), Roorkee, India

gavendra@email.unc.edu