Goutam Konapala spent most of his early years in a village near Srikakulam city in Andhra Pradesh before joining IIT and later heading to the US where he is now working with NASA.
Goutam Konapala, who now works for US space agency NASA, has an inspiring story of rise from an unknown village in South India. Defying the odds, he cracked admission into India’s most prestigious institute, the IIT. Konapala spent most of his early years in a village near Srikakulam city in Andhra Pradesh. He earned admission at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bhubaneswar from where he got a BTech degree in civil engineering.
Konapala then worked as a management consultant for a year at a Big Four firm in Kolkata. He then joined IIT Bombay for post graduation and earned a master’s degree in water resources engineering. After his IIT bachelors and masters, Konapala added to his academic qualification with a Ph.D. in hydrology from the Clemson University in South Carolina, US.
The young Indian scientist began his career with a postdoc at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, US, with their Environmental Sciences Division. His work as a postdoc brought him closer to NASA and he joined the space agency in 2020. At NASA, he performs computational research on Earth’s water cycle with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Biospheric Sciences Laboratory and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Goutam Konapala uses the Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) of NASA, working on machine learning-based modelling of Earth’s water cycle. This includes flood water mapping, snow retrieval, and sharing hydrologic knowledge with governments, scientists and public. Konapala is influenced by another Indian-origin scientist, Sujay Kumar of NASA Goddard.
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 "Meet Indian who grew up in a village, cracked IIT, now works with NASA as…")
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