dr Banerjee SreejitaŻyciorys naukowy

I was born and raised in Kolkata (India), on the banks of the Hooghly River, at the western edge of the Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna delta. Growing up there, water was never just scenery. It came with the monsoon, reshaped the land, and quietly set the rhythm of how people lived, farmed and ate. I also started traveling when I was just a year old, and that was when I first saw the Bay of Bengal. My love of travel grew through my childhood, and with it a curiosity about how the rivers and mountains I saw had been formed. That curiosity led me to study geography.

After teaching high school geography in Assam, I moved to Thailand in 2022 for my PhD at the Asian Institute of Technology, and the Mekong became my second delta. My doctoral research looked at livelihood resilience in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta through an ecosystem lens. I studied how hydrological ecosystem services, and the nature-based solutions that sustain them, support food security. From there the work kept widening. I ran a co-design workshop on women's leadership in flood-risk adaptation in Dhangadhi, Nepal. I worked on participatory ecosystem-based adaptation with farming communities in Savannakhet, Lao PDR. I helped build geography and biology curricula for the Mekong Delta with Can Tho University. Most recently, during my post doctoral research, I worked on the CLARE-ASEAN program focusing on the ASEAN cities.

Since October 2026, I have been an assistant professor in the Faculty of Geographical Sciences at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz. It is a city shaped by the Brda and the Vistula: a long way from the tropics, but never far from a river. Alongside teaching, I continue my research on nature-based solutions and ecosystem-based adaptation in Europe and Southeast Asia. My work sits where remote sensing meets community workshops, and where models meet the people whose lives they are meant to describe.

I believe environmental science proves its worth on the ground: on the riverbank, in the paddy field, in the village meeting where adaptation is actually decided. These days much of my time goes into models, proposals and project management. Still, the moments I value most are the ones spent listening to farmers, students, colleagues, and the rivers themselves. I'm happiest with delta mud on my boots and a good map, paper or QGIS, close at hand.