Natarajan Ishwaran is now the Deputy Secretary General of Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE) responsible for the program’s international promotion and coordinating the work of the Secretariat distributed across China, France, US and the UK. DDE is an initiative of the International Union of Geological Science (IUGS) launched in 2019 and is committed to data driven research in solid earth sciences. It promotes the sharing of geological sciences data guided by FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) principles The DDE Platform, www.deep-time.org was officially launched on 8 November 2022 the day before the convening of the DDE Open Science Forum at UNESCO, Paris, and co-organized by UNESCO, IUGS and DDE. The Forum was an activity recognized under the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development (IYBSSD)

During his early career, he worked on Asian elephant conservation in the context of river valley development in his native Sri Lanka. From 1986 to 2012 he worked in UNESCO and served in key positions such as Chief, Natural Heritage (1996-2004) and Director, Division of Ecological and Earth Sciences (2004-2012). Since 2012 he has been associated with international centers and programs in China to promote the application of space and data science technologies for ecosystem management and conservation of natural and cultural heritage. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier Journal, Environmental Development, from 2018 to 2021.