Dr. Prakash Kumar(India),. Director, CSIR-National Geophysical Research Institute, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India. The nominee has made outstanding contributions in devising numerous innovative methodologies aimed at elucidating sub-surface structures, including imaging the lithosphere and characterizing the asthenosphere in diverse geological regimes worldwide using converted shear-wave methods. He is internationally renowned for: (i) Imaging the lithosphere and determining the thickness of the thin Indian lithosphere vis-à-vis various Gondwana fragments that explain the fast drift of the Indian lithosphere during the Cretaceous period; (ii) Understanding the normal ocean plate in the Pacific and its relation to the thermal evolution; (iii) Elucidating the mode of conversion of Indian and Asian plates along the Himalayan arc; (iv) application of novel artificial intelligence/machine learning algorithms to address key geoscientific issues such as denoising seismological data and conducting physics-based inversion for sub-surface imaging and reservoir studies. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, India (NASI), he has received the CSIR Young Scientist Award, Krishnan Medal, National Geoscience Award by the Ministry of Mines, and Anni Talwani Memorial Prize, among others.