Prof. Santosh Kumar from Kumaun University, Nainital, India (now at Baba Saheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow) spent one month (September 2026) at the Earth Science Institute under the National Scholarship Programme (NSP) of SAIA, Government of Slovakia. During his PhD studies at the Department of Geochemistry, Comenius University, Bratislava, which he completed in 1991, Prof. S. Kumar studied the origin and evolution of enclaves and host granitoids from the Hodruša-Štiavnica Intrusive Complex in the Western Carpathians. Some interesting enclave features in this intrusive complex indicate mixing and mingling and require reassessment using modern petrological methods, such as in situ elemental and isotope analyses, which would help develop a model of enclave genesis and its implications for understanding magma chamber dynamics and contribution to metallogenetic issues. He undertook this work during his stay at the Earth Science Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. Over nearly four decades of his research, he gained extensive experience studying granites, enclaves, and related rocks from the Himalaya, Cratonic, and Mobile belts of India, which showed similar styles of crustal-mantle interaction and magmatic processes in the origin and evolution of enclaves and granitoids from the Archean to the Phanerozoic. These processes are most common in calc-alkaline granitoids of subduction and post-collisional settings.
During fieldwork in and around Hodruša, we collected mafic to hybrid microgranular enclaves, which will undergo elemental and isotopic analyses. We are confident that the new dataset of enclave-granite samples collected from Hodruša Štiavnica, in collaboration with Prof. Santosh Kumar, J. Lexa, and I. Broska, will shed new light on enclave-granite petrogenesis and improve our knowledge of related metallogeny.
During his stay at the institute, Prof. Santosh Kumar defended his Doctor of Science (DrSc.) thesis on the geochronology, petrogenesis, and tectonomagmatic evolution of granites and related rocks in the diverse terrains of the Himalaya, cratons, and mobile belts of India. We congratulate Prof. Santosh Kumar on successfully defending his DrSc. thesis before the Commission of Earth and Environmental Sciences, chaired by Adam Tomašových.
