Professor Kauro Kashima (Visiting Professor)

Kaoru Kashima is a paleoenvironmental scientist and a retired Associate Professor of Kyushu University, specializing in the reconstruction of past environmental and climate changes using sedimentary records, fossil diatoms, and multi-proxy approaches. His research has focused on coastal and lacustrine systems, with particular emphasis on Holocene sea-level change, monsoon variability, and extreme events such as typhoons and tsunamis, as well as their interactions with human activities in East Asia and beyond. Through detailed diatom analyses and stratigraphic investigations, his work provides high-resolution reconstructions of paleoenvironmental dynamics and natural hazard histories, contributing to a deeper understanding of long-term climate variability and its relevance to present-day environmental change.

Dr. Abdur Rahman (Assistant Research Fellow)

He is originally from Uttar Pradesh, India. He completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Geology at Aligarh Muslim University and later moved to the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, India, where he pursued Earth Sciences. Subsequently, he joined the CCU Paleoenvironment Lab at National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan, where he is currently working as an Assistant Research Fellow.  

He is a stable isotope geochemist specializing in paleoenvironmental reconstruction, with particular research interests in climate–fire–vegetation–human interactions and black carbon dynamics. His research focuses on lake and marine sedimentary archives from Taiwan, the Himalaya, and surrounding regions to investigate past fire activity, vegetation dynamics, and hydroclimatic variability. By integrating black carbon records with stable isotope geochemistry and other paleoenvironmental indicators, his work aims to reconstruct changes in fire regimes and their links to climate variability, ecosystem responses, and moisture availability. This research provides insights into the complex interactions among climate, fire, vegetation, and human influences across different temporal and spatial scales.

Website: https://abdur709.github.io/

Dr. Deepak Kumar Rai (Postdoc Fellow)

Deepak Kumar Rai is a paleoceanographer and marine bigeochemist from Kushinagar (Uttar Pradesh, India), the historic site associated with the Mahaparinirvana of Gautama Buddha. He earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Geology from the University of Allahabad before joining the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) for his doctoral research. He conducted his PhD research at PRL and received his doctoral degree through Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar.

His research focuses on reconstructing past ocean oxygenation and nitrogen cycling in the northern Indian Ocean during the late Quaternary using geochemical proxies preserved in marine sediments. His work integrates foraminiferal trace-element geochemistry, and stable isotopes to investigate links among monsoon variability, ocean circulation, productivity, and oxygen minimum zones over the past ~50,000 years. His doctoral research particularly examined glacial–interglacial changes in the Arabian Sea oxygen minimum zone using foraminiferal iodine-to-calcium (I/Ca) ratios and nitrogen isotopes.

He has presented his research at several international conferences and workshops and has received multiple early-career travel grants, including for the Goldschmidt Conference 2025, Ocean Sciences Meeting 2026, and the PAGES Past Ocean Oxygenation (PO2) workshop in Bristol, UK. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at National Chung Cheng University, investigating paleoclimatic and biogeochemical changes in the Taiwan region and the surrounding seas.

Ranjan Kumar Mohanty (Ph.D. student)

He is from Keonjhar, Odisha, India, a region known for its ancient hills and mineral-rich geological heritage, including some of the oldest rock formations on Earth. He is currently a PhD researcher in the Paleoclimate Lab at National Chung Cheng University (CCU), Taiwan. He completed his Bachelor’s degree at Utkal University, Odisha, and his Master’s degree in Geology at Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu. Prior to joining CCU, he worked as a Project–Junior Research Fellow at the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad, supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India.

His research specializes in geochemistry, with a focus on paleoclimate reconstruction and biogeochemistry. He has experience in radiocarbon measurements, graphitization techniques, and stable isotope analysis. His earlier work investigated soil carbon dynamics in tropical forest ecosystems using soil and soil-air measurements. In his PhD research, he focuses on East and Southeast Asia, examining long-term interactions among climate variability, ecosystems, and human activity. Using terrestrial and marine sediment archives integrated with stable isotope geochemistry and multiple environmental and biological proxies, his work reconstructs past climate extremes and surface biogeochemical processes. A key component of his research is black carbon analysis, which provides insights into past fire activity, biomass burning, and land-use change. He also integrates pollen and diatom records to reconstruct vegetation dynamics, hydroclimatic variability, and ecosystem responses over time.