Rajiv Sinha has worked on various aspects of river science, and his main research interests include river dynamics and floods, fluvial remote sensing, and river response to climate change. Some of his major contributions include source area classification, a hydro-geomorphic approach to understanding floods, and paleohydrologic and paleoclimatic reconstructions using sedimentary archives and drill cores. He is currently involved in several projects in the Ganga basin related to river health, environmental flows, hydrological and sediment transport modeling, and flood risk assessment.