Bio

Kukuh Pambuka Putra is a sport scientist whose work sits at the meeting point of exercise physiology and the underwater environment. His earlier research engaged with diving through a broader physiological lens, alongside studies in heart rate variability, body composition, and exercise adaptation. Building on that foundation, in 2025 he began a focused new research roadmap dedicated to a single, deliberately narrow niche: the physiology of diving and breath-hold (apnea) performance — how the body's autonomic, cardiovascular, respiratory, splenic, and oxidative-stress systems respond under the combined load of hypoxia, pressure, and immersion.

This roadmap is at its early stage, and its central questions are still being mapped rather than answered. The direction is clear: to develop non-invasive, field-deployable ways of reading a diver's physiological status and recovery across different diving modalities — from recreational scuba and rebreather to saturation and freediving — and to understand how training for divers should differ from training built around land-based, normobaric sport. It is a long-term commitment to an area that remains, for now, largely open.