Dr. Praktan Wadnerkar

Passionate about finding innovative ways to solve problems.

Praktan has around 8+ years of experience, working as an scientist, engineer and researcher in the field of hydro-environment.Currently he is appointed as sustainabiltiy and environemtnal program officer in Maitland City Council. Before this he was working as a GIS and project coodinator in Burnett Mary Regional Group and research assistant in NSW's top research center on Coastal environmental engineering i.e National Marine Science Center, Coffs harbor. He is interested in waterways management, groundwater and surface water interactions. In particular, he is doing research based on hydrology and bio-geochemistry of groundwater and surface water. He also investigate the consequence of land use on submarine groundwater, greenhouse gases and nutrient transport from land to sea.

He worked for leading French multinational utility company- SUEZ Environnement. He carried out a research internship with Centre Européen de Recherche et d’Enseignement des Géosciences de l’Environnement, France (CNRS CEREGE UMR) as part of his masters in hydraulic and civil engineering at Grenoble INP France (ENSE3- Ecole Nationale Supérieure de l'Energie, l'Eau et l'Environnement, France).

As part of international masters of hydraulic and civil engineering he worked on challenging water distribution improvement program in slum of Mumbai which has 30000 inhabitants, where he was part of waterGEMS hydraulic modeling and water for slum social team. Recently he was working with legendary firm CEREGE in Marseille, France. He was working on latest and advanced research project of braided river using photogrammetry and (Acoustic method) hydrophones,main objective of that work was to prevent city of Sisteron from flooding.

More over his main work experiences have directly related designing, operation, maintenance and management of water distribution network from leading multinational company SUEZ Environnement. He has some good experiences in non-revenue water sector with advanced leak detection techniques as well as water network modeling software’s like waterGEMS, EPANET and HEC-RAS.

Through his course work he acquired skills using a wide range of software. For example, he used the software abaqus to study non-linear dam behavior as part of an engineering project of Itzurt dam during my Masters Course work. In addition, Praktan used software such as RDM6, PLAXIS for projects such as reconstruction of mobile dams on the Seine River and to study the impacts of an embankment on soil saturation. Finally, he used HECRAS to study hydraulics and sediment transport projects. For recent research internship Praktan used ArcGIS tools like Geomorphic Change Detection (GCD).

Praktan is dynamic person who enjoys tackling new challenges and enjoy working collaboratively. Having worked in multiple countries, Praktan’s international exposure helped him to enhance his engineering competence in a truly multi-­disciplinary and multicultural environment.