Alumni Profile

Prashant Shekhar, CDSE PhD '19

Prashant Shekhar, CDSE PHD class of 2019.

What made you choose UB for your PhD?
The best thing I find about UB is the cross-culture interaction in the student body and the wide variety of opportunities that we get here. According to me, these are the components for successful personal and professional development. Besides these things, I also found the research areas of the faculty members at UB in alignment with the topics which I wanted to pursue further. These things made UB an easy choice

What do you like most about CDSE at UB?
I find CDSE to be a unique program with a lot of things to offer. The CDSE program is a perfect combination of applied mathematics and statistical analysis coupled with high-performance computational techniques for handling problems related to big data and Machine Learning. Also, the interdisciplinary nature of the research enables us to interact with people from different backgrounds and learn a lot of new things 

What are you working on?
Currently, I am working on modeling the ice sheet dynamics for parts of the Greenland Ice Sheet. The approach I am following currently is totally data-driven without involving much physics. In modeling terms, the problem boils down to a spatio-temporal modeling analysis for data that is non-uniformly distributed both in space as well as in time. Kernel-related learning methods, Hierarchical models, Splines and Multiscale methods are some of the ideas I am looking at in my research.