As Dean – School of Environment and Sustainability (SES), Jagdish will lead the build-out of the School, providing the strategic direction and operational guidance needed to expand its academic footprint, research activities and network, practice portfolio, and capacity-building initiatives. Jagdish will also help develop the IIHS Kengeri campus and its environs as India’s first Urban Ecological Observatory and strengthen IIHS’s profile in Ecology and Conservation Science.
He is a field ecohydrologist and a landscape ecologist with research and teaching interests in applied statistics, environmental applications of remote sensing and GIS, ecosystem services, ecological restoration, river ecology and climate change. He loves the challenge of understanding complex changes in the environment over time and space. He was the Coordinating Lead Author of the Special IPCC Report on Climate Change and Land.
Jagdish moves to IIHS from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bengaluru where he has been a faculty member for over 20 years – and collaborated with IIHS teams on multiple projects. He began his career at Development Alternatives, New Delhi where he worked in sustainability and environment. He has been a faculty member at the Wildlife Institute of India and has also been an affiliate teaching faculty at the National Centre for Biological Sciences-TIFR (NCBS-TIFR), Bengaluru where he has been involved with the Masters Programme in Wildlife Biology and Conservation since its inception.