Vamsi Ganti

Biography

I was born and raised in South India and received my Bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. I moved to the US to pursue my PhD at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. I joined UCSB as a faculty in 2018, and prior to that, I was a postdoc at Caltech and a research fellow at the Imperial College London.

Research

We seek to quantify and understand the mechanics of physical processes that shape the landscapes on Earth and other planets, and to unravel the expression of these processes in the ancient sedimentary record. We work on a range of environments (from erosional to depositional landscapes), across a wide range of spatiotemporal scales (from migration of a single river dune to the scale of sedimentary basin filling), and across modern and ancient systems. The unifying themes that connect these contrasting scales and environments is our desire to quantify the effect of variability, and to quantitatively map the dynamics of surface processes to their depositional products in the ancient rock record.

To address these questions, we use an interdisciplinary, integrated approach that combines our understanding of modern geomorphic processes and ancient sedimentary deposits with the hydrodynamics of sediment transport and loose-boundary hydraulics. We combine a wide array of tools ranging from sediment transport theory, mathematical and statistical analyses, physical experiments, and field observations to address these research challenges.