Dr. Bijal Chudasama joined the Digital Products and Services unit at GTK in June 2019 as a postdoctoral researcher. She will be working on application of artificial intelligence to geodata interpretation for the next two years and her first project is oGIIR. Bijal is going to start working on open GIS tools for mineral prospectivity mapping using QGIS platform.
Bijal successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay), India last month. Her Ph.D. research was on genetic modelling, prospectivity analyses and estimations of undiscovered endowment of calcrete uranium systems in Western Australia and Namibia. Her key research expertise lies in implementation of machine learning algorithms to regional scale mineral targeting as well as for feature extraction from satellite-borne and air-borne data such as multispectral, thermal infrared and magnetic data.
Bijal has strong background in both fundamental economic geology and geo-computation. During her PhD research she has developed high level of computational skills in the following areas: machine learning algorithms; spatial geoscience data analyses in GIS; geochemical data analysis and geochemical simulations/modelling; feature extraction and interpretation of air-borne and ground geophysical and satellite-borne remote sensing data; and geoscience data integration for exploration targeting. In addition, she has done intensive field work in India and Africa, which gives her a good perspective to interpret the modelling outputs in the context of field geology. Welcome to our team, Bijal.
Vesa Nykänen, Geological Survey of Finland