DR. AKSHAI K RUNCHAL, President, Analytic & Computational Research Inc., California, USA

Dr. Akshai K. Runchal has over 50 years of experience in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and numerical simulation of flow, heat and mass transport processes in engineering and environmental sciences. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1969 from Imperial College (London) under the guidance of Prof. D. B. Spalding. He was a key member of the 3-person team led by Spalding that invented the Finite Volume Method (FVM) of Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in mid-1960's. He started his professional career as a faculty member at IIT Kanpur in 1969 and has taught as regular or adjunct faculty at a number of leading institutes including IIT(Kanpur), Imperial College (London), University of California (Los Angeles), Cal Tech (Pasadena), and Cal State (Northridge). In 1979, Dr. Runchal established the ACRi group of companies (www.acricfd.com) that now has offices in Los Angeles (USA), Nice (France) and Bangalore (India). Core expertise of ACRi Group is engineering, environmental and Space Sciences. Over the past 40 years, they have provided advanced technology and CFD Simulation services to an over 200 clients that include major corporations, R&D organizations, cities and governments in over 20 countries. In 2011, Dr. Runchal founded a non-profit CFD Virtual Reality Institute (www.CFDVRi.org) to further the cause of CFD education, training and R&D. For the past 50 years, Dr Runchal, has consulted extensively on projects related to flow, heat and mass transfer, combustion, environmental impact, management of air, surface and ground water resources, safe disposal of hazardous and nuclear waste, and, policy and decision analysis. He is the principal author of the ANSWER®, PORFLOW®, TIDAL®, and RADMTM simulation models that are widely employed by commercial, academic and R&D organizations. He obtained a Bachelor's in Engineering with Honors from Punjab Engineering College (PEC, Chandigarh) in 1964. He is the author or co-author of 12 books and over 200 technical publications. Dr. Runchal has received professional honors and awards and has delivered keynote and invited talks at more than 100 international conferences and seminars. He is a Fellow of the ASME and has served as Chairman of the IIT Kanpur Foundation Board. He was a member of the IIT Gandhinagar Advisory Board from 2012 to 2019. He has acted as an Advisor to DeitY (Government of India) and the Indian Army. He has been engaged in assisting a number of educational institutes in their R&D and Industrial Relations Programs. Dr. Runchal has received professional honors and awards and, has provided invited contributions at a number of international conferences and seminars. Dr. Runchal grew up in the scenic hill town of McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala that is now on the world map as the hometown of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Since 2006 he has been deeply engaged in reviving the lost heritage of Kangra Miniature Paintings through Kangra Arts Promotion Society – an NGO based in McLeod Ganj. He divides his time between Los Angeles and McLeod Ganj and is actively engaged in promoting education, training and R&D in CFD and related disciplines.

Dr. MURALI DAMODARAN, Senior Research Scientist, NUS Singapore.

Dr. Murali Damodaran is currently a Senior Research Scientist with the Centre for Aerodynamics and Propulsion at Temasek Laboratories, NUS, Singapore (since 2018). Prior to this, he held faculty positions in aerospace and mechanical engineering at NTU, Singapore (1989-2010), IIT Gandhinagar, India (2010-2015) and NUS (2016-2018). His research interests are in the broad areas of Aerospace and Computational Engineering and lately exploring possibilities of machine learning in scientific computing for engineering applications in the wake of a resurgence in AI. He earned his BTech in Aeronautical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, India and his MS and PhD in Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University, USA. His profile can be found at http://temaseklabs.nus.edu.sg/program/program_lowspeedaerodynamics_tslmura.html.

DR. MADHUKAR M RAO, Technical Director, ACRi Bangalore

Dr. Madhukar M Rao is a Technical Director at ACRi, Bangalore. He is also an Adjunct Professor at CFD Virtual Reality Institute (CFDVRi), Dharamshala, HP. He is a B Tech from IIT Madras, MS and PhD from Univ. of Florida, Gainesville under the supervision of Prof. Wei Shyy. He has developed and implemented unstructured mesh algorithms into a commercial finite volume CFD code, ANSWER™. He is a co-author of the book on Computational Fluid Dynamics with Moving Boundaries published by Taylor and Francis. He is a specialist in Computational Fluid Dynamics, Computational Heat Transfer, Reacting Flows and Combustion, Ground water and flow in Porous Media, Shallow Water, Atmospheric Flows and Transport. He is currently interested in machine learning and physics informed neural networks in fluid mechanics research.

PROF. ASHOKE DE, Professor, IIT Kanpur

Dr. Ashoke De is currently a Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at IIT Kanpur. Dr. De received his PhD from Louisiana State University, USA. He was a post-doctoral scholar at the Technical University of Delft (TU-Delft), Netherlands and as Research Engineer in GE Global research in Bangalore, India. He is a recipient of a DAAD Fellowship (2016), IEI-Young Engineer’s Award-2014 (Aerospace Engineering), Early Career Research award-2015 (DST, India), Expertise Award-2010 (GE Global research), and P K Kelkar Young Research Fellowship (2015-2018, IITK). He is AvHumboldt Fellow, Fellow of West Bengal Academy of Science and Technology, Associate Editor of International Journal of Energy for a Clean Environment (2019-present), and current member of APS, AIAA, ASME, SIAM, FMFP, ISHMT and Combustion Institute. His current research interests include multiphase modeling, hybrid RANS/LES model development, supersonic flows and Fluid-Structure interactions (FSI).

PROF. PRABHU RAMCHANDRAN, Professor, IIT Bombay

Prabhu Ramachandran is a faculty member at the department of aerospace engineering, IIT Bombay. His primary research interests are in particle methods for computational fluid dynamics, scientific computing, parallel and high-performance computing, and applied scientific data visualization. He has been actively involved with the FOSS and Python communities for the past two decades. Along with his students, he has been building an open source framework for particle simulations called PySPH (https://pysph.readthedocs.io). He is the creator of the Mayavi Python package for 3D visualization(https://github.com/enthought/mayavi). He is a PI of the FOSSEE project (https://fossee.in). For more information see https://www.aero.iitb.ac.in/~prabhu.

PROF. M SEKHAR, Professor, IISc Bangalore

Dr. M Sekhar is a Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at IISc Bangalore. He was a Visiting Professor at a University in France. He was visiting scientist at various organizations in France, The Netherlands, and The USA. He works in research areas including groundwater hydrology, agro-hydrology, satellite hydrology, and urban hydrogeology. He is an Associate Editor for Hydrological Sciences Journal, Frontiers in Water: Water and Hydrocomplexity, Journal of Groundwater Research. He was an Editorial Board member for Proceedings of ICE - Water Management. His interests include analysis of flow and reactive transport in groundwater systems, field-scale experiments in watershed hydrology, hydroclimatic & anthropogenic controls on groundwater, numerical methods, geospatial & geophysical methods, optimization & inverse problems, and modeling of environmental hydraulic processes.

PROF. PRADEEP KUMAR, Assistant Professor, IIT Mandi

Dr. Pradeep Kumar is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering at IIT Mandi. He is a PhD from IIT Kanpur in the area of CFD modelling of radiation. He has worked as a software developer at ANSYS-Fluent India pvt. Ltd. His current interests include Thermo-Fluid Sciences, Solar Thermal Radiation, Optics, Collimated Beam Radiation, Non-gray Radiation Properties Calculations, Interfacial Phenomena of Radiation and development of Computational Tools.

PROF. AMARESH DALAL, Professor, IIT Guwahati

Dr. Amaresh Dalal is currently a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. He is a Ph.D. from IIT Kanpur and he was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Purdue University. His research interests include Computational Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer, Finite Volume Methods and Unstructured Grid Techniques, Multiphase Flows. Dr. Dalal is actively involved in developing a general purpose, versatile and robust computational fluid dynamics solver over the hybrid unstructured grid, which can solve a wide range of real-life fluid flow, heat transfer, and problems involving transport phenomena over complex geometries. He is a recipient of the Prof KN Seetharamu Medal and Prize for the Best Young Researcher in Heat Transfer-2017 from Indian Society of Heat and Mass Transfer.

PROF. MANAS DAS, Professor, IIT Guwahati

Dr Manas Das is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India since 2012. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Production Engineering Dept., Jadavpur University, Master’s, and PhD degree from the Mechanical Engineering Dept., IIT Kanpur. His research areas include advanced finishing and nano-finishing processes, magnetorheological finishing (MRF) process, advanced machining processes and micromachining processes. He has published more than 33 papers in reputed international journal and published more than 43 conference papers. He has also written 15 book chapters and one book in the area of surface finishing. Four research scholars have received PhD degree under his supervision. Presently, he is supervising eight PhD students in the broad area of manufacturing.

MR. CHAKRAPANI, Operation Manager, ACRi Bangalore

Mr. Chakrapani A is an operation manager at ACRi InfoTech Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore for past 18 years. He is also an Assistant adjunct Professor at CFD Virtual Reality Institute (CFDVRi), Dharamshala, India. He has been actively involved in the CFD activities such as CFD modelling of gas turbine combustors, Coupled Hydraulic and Transport Calculations for porous media applications with ACRi's tool PORFLOW, Solution mining, Groundwater flow and contaminate transport modelling of high-level nuclear waste, Tsunami modelling, Flow and dust transport around buildings, and biomedical simulations. He is extensively involved in the design and testing the features of grid generator, customized templates and software for new features and new versions. He has designed and delivered CFD training for a short time and long term certificate courses using Interactive distance learning platform. Guided students during their masters / bachelor project work at ACRi InfoTech. He has delivered invited talks at various CFD workshops and faculty development programmes conducted by the premier educational institutions.

MR. RAJGOPAL, R and D Manager, ACRi Bangalore

Mr. Rajagopal is currently working as R & D Manager at ACRi InfoTech Pvt. Ltd. He is an expert in Computational Fluid Dynamics, Shallow Water, Free Surface, Atmospheric Flow and Dispersion, Grid Generation, and CFD User Interface development. He is a CFD consultant working on projects related to gas turbine combustors, groundwater flow and pollutant transport, tsunami propagation and run up, atmospheric flow and dispersion. At ACRi, he is responsible for the development and maintenance of CFDStudio(R) pre- and post-processor user interface. He has designed and implemented quick grid generation templates for common CFD geometries and client geometries. He worked on code development, testing and maintenance of CFD products--ANSWER(R), PORFLOW(R) and TIDAL(R), and provides technical support for CFD products-- ANSWER(R), PORFLOW(R) and TIDAL(R).

PROF. SUMER DIRBUDE, Assistant Professor, NIT Calicut

Dr. Sumer Dirbude is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the National Institute of Technology Calicut. He is a Ph.D. from IIT Kanpur. He has worked as an Assistant Professor at NIT Delhi and Scientist-C at Centre for Solar Energy Technology, IIT Jodhpur. His research areas include Computational Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer, combustion and Energy systems, Multiphase flows, and allied areas of thermo-fluid sciences. He is a member of ISHMT, FMFP, ISTE, SESI, and Combustion Institute.