2025: I just turned 63! But I'm still kicking with the energy of a 30 yr old. My open secret: a run of some 5 km every morning in Lalbagh, one of Bengaluru's thankfully alive lung spaces, taking the Metro train to get there from home.  I'm a travel addict too and love long drives. My pic here is from one of the countless lovely trails in Wayanad, a highly nature- rich hill station in Kerala, South India.

When I'm in the mood, I would be on my Mac working with the Julia library to develop solutions for one or other of a variety of problems that motivate me from economics to car sales. Check out this paper I and my PhD student authored on synthetic opinion generation from simple but novel fuzzy- genetic models.

And finally, I'm a nature lover, but not merely in the usual sense! To know why, do click on that 'spider button' right below, for my blog 'The God of Design'.

And now for my journey. I launched my career as a scientist with ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization), India's premier and one of the top space organizations across the globe. Today ISRO is known for a flawless landing on the moon (Chandrayaan 3), a successful docking and undocking (SPADEX) and Aditya L1, a spacecraft tapping into spectra from our sun. My years in ISRO still stay memorable, where we scientists would brainstorm to our heart's content on the right or wrong in structural design features of a Cartosat or Oceansat, supported by hours of simulations with the latest versions of NASTRAN, a finite element solver that stayed with me in all my career.

One day someone offered me a design specialist role with Airbus (UK). It seemed great then and I said yes. Rather rashly, as I soon realized. After some months in Bristol (UK), working on the (then evolving) A380's outboard ribs and false rear spar, one day my team was given a terrible handshake! Somebody handed our project to CASA (Spain)! After my next, but brief stint with a TATA group organization, my design engineering passion felt like it was somewhat too fettered and I moved to academics for the rest of my career.

My academic stint was the longest in my career, as a professor with a private university in Bengaluru, South India. While I taught undergraduates and postgraduate students subjects from Aerospace Structures to Rotor Dynamics, in parallel, I would provide training on core topics of aerospace and automotive domains to engineers from global majors.  And yes, a good chunk of my time was also spent as investigator of many sponsored research projects and in providing solutions to industries across manufacturing through design services. 

Finally of course, how I can ever forget my own academic years? They culminated with a hard- earned PhD from IISc, Bengaluru, specializing in Aerospace Structures. My PhD thesis, on aeroelastic tailoring for supersonic flutter, got me a noted publication in Composite Structures (Elsevier). Preceding that, I earned a Master's in Civil Engineering from IIT, Madras. And I entered the fascinating world of engineering with a Bachelors from Bangalore University.