Dr. Palaniappan Ramu holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical (Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai) and a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering (University of Florida, Gainesville). Prior to coming to the IIT Madras, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Notre Dame and as an optimization engineer at the Caterpillar Champaign Simulation Center, Urbana-Champaign. He has been on the faculty of the department of Engineering Design at the IIT Madras since December 2009. He heads the Advanced Design, Optimisation and Probabilistic Techniques Laboratory (ADOPT)