User:Gayatri Kathayat

Gayatri Kathayat is a geoscientist at Xi’an Jiaotong University (XJTU), China [1][2]. She is an Indian origin (Nainital, Uttarakhand) palaeoclimatologist who started her early career in China. Her core expertise is in the field of monsoon reconstruction using cave speleothems on a wide range of timescales [3][4], on generating geochronology and to understand the interaction of climate with speleothem geochemistry, and analyzes climate and paleoclimate data to investigate natural climate variability. Her research also focuses on understanding the climate dynamics and climate impact on human societies [5]. She earned a PhD from the Xi’an Jiaotong University in 2016 and is an associate professor at the Xi’an Jiaotong University [1].

Education
Kathayat earned her PhD in Engineering from XJTU, China with Prof. Hai Cheng in 2016 [5], Chinese Scientific Council (CSC) Fellowship. She received her MS in Geological Sciences from the Kumoun University in 2006. After earning her Ph.D. she was a post-doctoral research fellow at Xi’an Jiaotong University from 2016-2019 with a Prof. Hai Cheng [6]. In her academic career Kathayat have acquired the advance radiometric dating skills as a visiting research scholar at the Department of Earth Science at University of Minnesota, USA, under the direct supervisions of Profs. Hai Cheng [6] and Larry Edwards[7]—the two eminent scientists, whose pioneering work have revolutionized this field since the 1980s. Subsequently, honed her analytical skills by independently operating an ultra-clean chemistry laboratory at XJTU, which houses a number of state-of-the art equipment such the ICP-MS Neptune plus and stable isotope ratio mass spectrometers.

Career
Kathayat joined the faculty of the Xi’an Jiaotong University, China in 2019, and is a tenured Associate Professor in the Institute of Global Climate Change. She leads in generating the well-dated, oldest and longest Indian monsoon reconstruction records from the Indian-subcontinent [3][5][8] and the highest resolution possible, absolutely dated record across 4.2 ka -event[9]. Kathayat is an expert in paleoclimate, with research on the ancient history and climate change.

Kathayat postdoctoral and doctoral research at XJTU has focus on hi-fidelity reconstruction of the Indian summer monsoon variability on a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. To this end, she has developed high-resolution records of stable isotopes of oxygen and carbon from speleothems (cave deposits) that she collected from a number of locations throughout India. These speleothem records, spanning the last 300,000 years, are to date, the highest-resolution and chronologically most-precise records of the Indian monsoon variability [3][5][8][9]. A noteworthy aspect of these records, which sets them apart from other terrestrial proxy records of monsoon from India, is their unprecedented chronological framework, which she has meticulously established by applying the state-of-the-art Uranium-series dating methods. In her postdoctoral research she has forged extensive inter-disciplinary collaborative ties with a number of colleagues from all over the world. These collaborations have led to development of a number of paleoclimate records from China [4], North and South America [10], Madagascar [11] Iraq [12]and of course, from India[3][5][8][9]. The results from her research endeavors as well as those resulting from her collaborative partnerships, have generated considerable scientific and media interest and have been published in a number of high-impact factor journals such as in Nature, Science Advances, and Nature Communications.

Awards and honors
Young Scientist awardee by PAGES 2013,

Reference
[1] http://gr.xjtu.edu.cn/web/cheng021/research-group

[2] https://theconversation.com/profiles/gayatri-kathayat-885127

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep24374 Kathayat, Gayatri, et al. "Indian monsoon variability on millennial-orbital timescales." Scientific reports 6.1 (2016): 1-7.

[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18591 Cheng, Hai, et al. "The Asian monsoon over the past 640,000 years and ice age terminations." nature 534.7609 (2016): 640-646.

[5] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/12/e1701296.short Kathayat, Gayatri, et al. "The Indian monsoon variability and civilization changes in the Indian subcontinent." Science advances 3.12 (2017): e1701296

[6] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=P_UgxSYAAAAJ&hl=en

[7] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=i9y7XF4AAAAJ&hl=en

[8] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7309?referral=true Sinha, Ashish, et al. "Trends and oscillations in the Indian summer monsoon rainfall over the last two millennia." Nature communications 6.1 (2015): 1-8.

[9] https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/14/1869/2018/ Kathayat, Gayatri, et al. "Evaluating the timing and structure of the 4.2 ka event in the Indian summer monsoon domain from an annually resolved speleothem record from Northeast India." Climate of the Past 14.12 (2018): 1869-1879.

[10] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012821X19303681 Cheng, Hai, et al. "Eastern North American climate in phase with fall insolation throughout the last three glacial-interglacial cycles." Earth and Planetary Science Letters 522 (2019): 125-134.

[11] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/42/eabb2459.abstract Li, Hanying, et al. "A multimillennial climatic context for the megafaunal extinctions in Madagascar and Mascarene Islands." Science advances 6.42 (2020): eabb2459.

[12] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7309?referral=true Sinha, Ashish, et al. "Role of climate in the rise and fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire." Science advances 5.11 (2019): eaax6656.