Sri Niwas, born on 4 July 1946 in Rakhat village of Gorakhpur district, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to Ram Adhar Pandey, did his early schooling at local schools to complete his intermediate course from Board of High School and Intermediate Education Uttar Pradesh before joining Banaras Hindu University for his college education from where he passed BSc hons degree in 1966 and MSc in geophysics in 1968. He enrolled for doctoral studies at the same university and secured a PhD in 1974 for his thesis, Theoretical treatment of some problems on electrical behavior of layered Earth system. Subsequently, he did his post-doctoral studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee and in 1976, joined the institution as a pool officer to start his career. He served out his entire career at IIT Roorkee, holding such positions as a Lecturer and Reader before superannuating in 2011 as a professor. In between, he served as a professor, chair of the Department of Geophysics and joint director of the Summer School of Kurukshetra University from 1989 to 1992 on deputation and as a visiting professor at Federal University of Bahia during 2000–01. Post-retirement, he continued his association with IIT Roorkee as an emeritus professor. Sri Niwas was married to Shashi Kala and the couple had three children. He died on 15 November 2012, at the age 67.
Legacy
The researches of Niwas were focused on the geophysical problems with regard to their forward and inverse solutions and his pioneering work assisted in the electrical exploration of groundwater in alluvial terrains. He proposed models of system matrix function in terms of exponential functions and designed a methodology using singular value decomposition which is reported to have applications in a variety of geological environments. His studies have been detailed in several peer-reviewed articles; the online article repository of the Indian Academy of Sciences has listed a number of them. He also guided 12 doctoral and 110 MTech students in their studies. His contributions were reported in the establishment of the Department of Geophysics at Kurukshetra University and he was one of the group of academicians who designed a curriculum in geophysics for IIT Roorkee. He was a life member of the Indian Geological Congress and a member of the faculty of Earth Sciences of the Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research program of the Department of Science and Technology. He was also involved with the Summer School program of the Science and Engineering Research Council and was a referee of Proceedings in Earth and Planetary Sciences of the Indian Academy of Sciences.
Awards and honors
The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 1991. He was an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, Indian Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, India and the Indian Geophysical Union and a member of the Association of Exploration Geophysicists.
