Sai Sandeep Chitta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geospatial Engineering at Michigan Technological University. He holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the City University of Hong Kong and an M.Tech. in Geotechnical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India. Prior to joining Michigan Tech, he held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Oklahoma, Oregon State University, and the University of Arkansas, where he developed a broad experimental and computational foundation across geotechnical and geomechanical disciplines.

Chitta's research operates at the frontier of granular mechanics, geomaterial characterization, and bio-inspired geotechnical engineering. His work bridges grain-scale contact physics and bulk soil behavior, with expertise spanning biomediated soil treatment, tribology, breakage and fracture mechanics, discrete element method (DEM) simulations, and digital image analysis. He is currently investigating the mechanics of bonded sands, the micromechanical response of railway ballast, and the grain-scale behavior of lunar regolith simulants, research supported by funding from the National Science Foundation and the NURail Research Initiative by the FRA.

Chitta serves as an Associate Editor of Geotechnical and Geological Engineering and is an active member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and its Geo-Institute. His doctoral thesis was honored with the Ringo Yu Prize for Best Ph.D. Thesis in Geotechnical Studies from the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers, and his research has been recognized with an Editor's Choice distinction in the Canadian Geotechnical Journal.