Utpal Singh
PhD Candidate
Rm #411, F09 Madsen Building, Uni Sydney, NSW 2050
utpal.singh@sydney.edu.au| Homepage| Github| LinkedIn

About Me

I am a PhD candidate at the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, specializing in the geophysical and geodynamical properties of Earth’s interior. My research focuses on understanding Earth’s subsurface using geophysical methods. In addition, I am deeply interested in the application of remote sensing and satellite imagery, alongside exploration geophysics. I analyze spatio-temporal and subsurface data to gain insights into Earth’s lithology and to understand natural hazards and risks.

Education

Doctor of Philosophy 2023–Ongoing
The University of Sydney, School of Geoscience
Master of Science (Earth and Climate Science) 2020–2021
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Pune
Bachelor of Science (Natural Sciences) 2016–2020
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Pune

Experience

Geology-Geophysics Seminar Series Organiser Jan 2025 – Present
School of Geosciences, The University of Sydney
  • Organised and coordinated the Geology-Geophysics Seminar Series, collaborating with national and international researchers to promote academic exchange and interdisciplinary dialogue in geosciences.
  • Managed outreach and visibility through communication, social media presence, and website content management (via Earthbyte Website and Linkedin).
Project Staff Jan 2022 – Jun 2023
Dept. of Earth and Climate Sciences, IISER Pune (Dr. Sudipta Sarkar)
Project 1: Seismic Analysis of sub-seafloor gas migration over an Arctic Methane hydrate retreat zone.
  • Was involved in hydrate simulation runs, wrote codes to automate the runs and analysis plots and speeding up the process by parallelising the runs.
  • Simulated the impact of 11000 years of BWT (Bottom Water Temperature) and RSL (Relative Sea Level) change on hydrates
  • Automation scripts for simulation and analysis
  • Link to article

Project 2: Sedimentary records from human-made talavs reveal climate risks in semi-arid watersheds of India
  • Worked on landscape evolution models to model sediments in man-made reservoirs in Maharashtra.
  • Link to Article
Summer Project Intern May 2019 – Jul 2019
Space Applications Centre, ISRO, Ahmedabad (Dr. Hiren P. Bhatt)
Project Name: Observing trends of greenhouse gases and convective processes using satellite data (MODIS & AIRS)
  • Worked with MODIS and AIRS data from NASA.
  • Implemented data analysis to find trends in distribution of CH₄, CO and CO₂ over Indian Region in the atmosphere wrt latitude, longitude and height, across various seasons.
  • Identification of probable sources and sinks.
  • Identification of mechanisms behind these distribution trends and convective processes related to wind.
  • SAC, ISRO link to brief synopsis of work
Summer Project Intern May 2018 – Jul 2018
Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur (Dr. Subhashish Banerjee)
Project Name: Quantum Entanglement and Generalised Concurrence
  • Studied research papers based on Entanglement of formation and concurrence.
  • Classified Entropy of systems based high-low knowledge and information: Shannon Entropy, Binary Entropy, Von-Neumann Entropy.
  • Entanglement of formation for bipartite systems: 2-qubits, isotropic states, Werner states
  • Studied density matrices, entropy, and bipartite systems
  • Concurrence and its Generalisation: Arbitrary conjugation, Universal Inverter
  • Entanglement of formation report

Teaching Experience

Demonstrator Aug 2023 – Nov 2023
School of Geosciences, The University of Sydney
Course: GEOL1003: Earth Science: Past and Future of our Planet
Teaching Assistant Jan 2023 – April 2023
Dept. of Earth and Climate Sciences, IISER Pune. Course Coordinator: Dr. Sudipta Sarkar
Course: EC3284 Satellite Data Analysis and Image Processing
Teaching Assistant Jan 2022 – April 2022
Dept. of Earth and Climate Sciences, IISER Pune. Course Coordinator: Dr. Sudipta Sarkar
Course: EC6293 Exploration Seismology Lab

Projects

Evolution of submarine channel systems and Mass transport deposits in the Taranaki Basin, offshore New Zealand Jan 2021 – Ongoing
Dr. Sudipta Sarkar, IISER Pune
  • U-Net CNN for fault segmentation using synthetic seismic data
  • Multi-attribute analysis: variance, RMS amplitude, sweetness, similarity, spectral decomposition
  • GLCM attribute extraction: energy, contrast, entropy, homogeneity, variance
  • Mapping GLCM attributes to original seismic for interpretation
Numerical modelling for short-time tsunami forecasting Jan 2020 – Apr 2020
Dr. Utsav Mannu, IISER Pune
  • Probabilistic prediction of real-time tsunami data
  • Simulation using staggered leap-frog scheme, shallow water theory
Hyperian, Sentinel-2 and Aster based mapping of Ophiolite suite of rocks Aug 2019 – Dec 2019
Dr. Sudipta Sarkar, IISER Pune
  • Image analysis of satellite products (VNIR, SWIR, TIR bands)
  • PCA for dimensionality reduction
  • Supervised/unsupervised image classification (k-means, neural networks, etc.)

Software Projects

Kalpa 2024 - Present
  • A unified opensource cross-platform for geodata, AI, and visualization
Vyom 2024 - Present
  • Download remote sensing and satellite data directly into Kalpa Software
  • Provides instant access to large scale datasets, processing and further analysis
COVID-19 Dashboard Aug 2020 – Dec 2020
  • Web scraper and data analysis for COVID datasets globally using Django

Publications

Conferences

Relevant Skills

Certifications

Fundamentals of Deep Learning

Fundamentals of Accelerated Computing with CUDA C/C++

Fundamentals of Accelerated Computing with CUDA Python

Fundamentals of Accelerated Data Science with RAPIDS

Accelerating Data Engineering Pipelines

Building Transformer-Based Natural Language Processing Applications

Neural Networks and Deep Learning

Introduction to Structured Query Language (SQL)

Programming Fundamentals

Python Data Structures

Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python)

Python for Data Science (IBM)