Colorado School of Mines Archives

Dr. Kamini Singha is a university distinguished professor and the associate dean for Research and Faculty Affairs in Earth and Society Programs at the Colorado School of Mines. A groundwater hydrologist with over 20 years of research experience, she leads one of the premier hydrogeophysics research groups in the United States. In over 130 peer-reviewed publications, her work explores the complex interactions between water, geology, and biology, specifically focusing on subsurface controls on ecohydrological function and the role of groundwater within “critical zone” systems – the vital layer of the Earth stretching from treetops to the base of aquifers. Notably, Dr. Singha’s research was the first to use geophysics to address a fundamental controversy in hydrology: the trapping of solute mass in dead-end porosity. This discovery has implications for understanding contaminant transport, self-remediation of streams, and tree water uptake.

An internationally recognized leader, Dr. Singha is a fellow of both the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the Geological Society of America (GSA). Her contributions have been honored with prestigious invitations, including as the National Groundwater Association’s Darcy Lecturer, in which capacity she gave 81 talks across the globe in 2017, and as the AGU Witherspoon Lecturer in 2022. She is also an editor with Water Resources Research.

Beyond her research, Dr. Singha is a celebrated educator committed to mentoring the next generation of scientists. She has received numerous teaching accolades, including Penn State’s George W. Atherton Award and the Dean’s Faculty Excellence Award from the Colorado School of Mines.

Dr. Singha earned her BS in geophysics from the University of Connecticut and her PhD in hydrogeology from Stanford University. Her current work in Himachal Pradesh, India, carries deep personal significance, as she is studying the landscape and orchards of her father’s family to contribute to its environmental resilience.

Prof. Singha’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to enhance apple-production resilience in Himachal Pradesh through data-driven strategies. Partnering with the historic Stokes Heritage Apple Orchards – the birthplace of commercial apple cultivation in the region – and IIT Mandi, the project is addressing the decline in productivity caused by rising temperatures and decreasing snow cover. Prof. Singha’s research is integrating new ground-based instrumentation, historical records, and remote-sensing data to model hydrologic controls like soil moisture and snowmelt. Ultimately, this initiative seeks to provide actionable insights for precision irrigation and management.

Dr. Meenakshi Singh is a condensed matter experimentalist with her research focused on macroscopic quantum phenomena, quantum coherence, and quantum entanglement. She received her PhD in physics from Pennsylvania State University in 2012. She went on to work at Sandia National Laboratories on quantum computing as a postdoctoral scholar. At Sandia, she worked with a team focused on developing deterministic counted ion implants for quantum computing.

Since 2017, she has been an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the Colorado School of Mines. Her research projects include measurements of entanglement propagation, phonon physics in quantum dots and donors in semiconductors, and thermal effects in superconducting hybrids. Her research work in these areas has been published in more than 20 peer-reviewed journal publications and cited more than 900 times. She is the recipient of the prestigious CAREER award (2021–2026) from the National Science Foundation. Dr. Singh is also involved in nationwide educational efforts to build a quantum workforce through curriculum development, alliance building, and workshop organization. At the Colorado School of Mines, she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in digital electronics and microelectronics processing.

Through this Fulbright-Nehru award, Dr. Singh aims to achieve research, pedagogical, and cultural objectives. The research objective is to perform cutting-edge thermal measurements that can bring new insights into our understanding of fundamental physics in quantum materials and devices and thus catalyze novel applications. The pedagogical objective is to establish a graduate-student exchange program between the Colorado School of Mines and the Indian Institute of Science. Through student exchange, she expects the researchers at the two universities to collaborate on quantum information science research while training the “quantum workforce” of tomorrow. As for her cultural objective, it involves harnessing the two countries’ shared interests in quantum information science to engage in meaningful cultural exchange.