U. C. Mohanty, born on 29 June 1948 in the Indian state of Odisha, graduated in science from Utkal University in 1969 and completed his master's degree in physics from the same university in 1971. Subsequently, he enrolled for his doctoral studies at Hydrometeorological Centre of Russia and obtained a PhD in Tropical meteorology in 1978. Returning to India, he started his career at the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar as a senior scientific officer, a post he held till 1992 when he was sent on deputation to the Department of Science and Technology as the joint director and head of the Research Division for a three-year term. On completion of his deputation, he returned to IIT BBS but stayed there only for three more years and joined the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 1998 as a professor at the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences. In 1998, he assumed the directorship of the Centre and served as a Higher Academic Grade professor till his superannuation in 2013. On retirement, he returned to IIT BBS as a visiting professor and holds the rank of an emeritus professor. Since 2013, he has also been heading the Odisha Bigyan Academy as its president. He is also a former visiting scientist at the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre, Thailand and is a faculty member at the University Network for Climate and Ecosystems Change Adaptation Research of the United Nations.
Legacy
Mohanty is known to have done extensive research on Indian summer monsoon and his studies have assisted in widening the understanding of the phenomena. He developed several numerical models and simulations for weather prediction and his experiments helped predict tropical cyclones, rainfall events, thunderstorms and snow storms in the region. He overseas a team of researchers engaged in the study of coastal inundation with a view to develop Land-Ocean-Atmospheric Modelling System for predicting extreme weather events. His studies have been detailed in several peer-reviewed articles; ResearchGate and Google Scholar, two online repositories of scientific articles, have listed 270 and 323 of them respectively. He has also co-edited a book, Monitoring and Prediction of Tropical Cyclones in the Indian Ocean and Climate Change, published by Springer Science+Business Media in 2013. Mohanty is a member of the Core Group on Floods of the National Disaster Management Authority as well as the Scientific Review and Monitoring Committee of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology; he was among the organizers of the National Symposium on Tropical Meteorology at the Siksha O Anusandhan University during 19–23 December 2016. He was also involved in the organization of the 22nd State Level National Children's Science Congress held at KIIT International School in 2014 where he served as a judge of the congress. He is known to have made over 45 international visits and has delivered plenary or invited addresses at several conferences and seminars including the lecture on Numerical Simulation of Track and Intensity of Orissa Super Cyclone-1999 at the 5th International Conference on Information Technology in 2002, the seminar on Numerical Modeling of Land Surface Processes for Improved-Simulation of Extreme Weather Events over the Indian Region of 2014 and the Colloquium on Recent Developments in Prediction of Tropical Cyclone and Associated Coastal Hazards of 2016, both held at IIT Bhubaneswar, and the National Workshop on GPS RO Techniques and Applications of 2015 held at SRM Institute of Science and Technology.
