I am an Assistant Professor in structural engineering group of the Department of Civil Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India. 

Earlier, I worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Michele Barbato at University of California, Davis, from August 2022 to December 2024. I worked on wildfire hazards. I worked closely with affiliates of the CITRIS Climate Initiative located across multiple University of California campuses. Prior to UC Davis, I worked with Prof. Solomon Tesfamariam at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna. I worked at UBC on developing high-rise hybrid timber building systems in addition to ground motion selection per the latest NBCC 2020. 

I defended my thesis in August 2020 at the Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Bombay. For my doctoral thesis, I worked under the supervision of Prof. Ravi Sinha. My doctoral thesis provides insights into the probabilistic seismic performance of buildings. I proposed seismic risk-consistent design frameworks that harmonize the specific requirements of stringent seismic performance expectations. Further, I investigated the importance of targeting multiple performance objectives in the performance-based seismic design and proposed a framework to improve risk-targeted design guidelines. I developed an archetypical building index for RC special moment-resisting frame buildings, which is available for download from the publications page. I was conferred upon the Institute's gold medal awarded to one out of over 2000 graduates across all disciplines and programs at IIT Bombay for concurrent excellence in academics, research, sports, and organization.

During my Ph.D., I gained research-oriented industry experience by carrying out a PSHA study for an extremely important concrete gravity dam in northeast India. I also assessed the impact factor for the high-speed rail projects considering dynamic interaction between the bridge and multi-train movement. Further, I predicted the performance of special buildings for severe impulsive loading with large uncertainties to identify the dominant failure mode.

I completed my bachelor's in Civil Engineering from IIT Bombay in 2011. Prior to starting my Ph.D., I worked in the industry for three years as a Structural Engineer gaining rich experience in designing different types of reinforced concrete, steel, and composite structures including buildings, bridges, and several miscellaneous structures. I worked with Sheltera Consultants Pvt Ltd (2011--13) and Larsen & Toubro (2013--14). From grueling meetings with architects and services teams to offering clients several options for adopted structural systems, both my jobs involved an array of endeavors required to safeguard new structures, apart from regular forces, specifically against seismic and wind forces. I was exposed to international design guidelines including EC 8 and ASCE/SEI 7-10. Further, I designed schemes for retrofitting deficient RC columns and shear walls of existing buildings. 

I have an avid interest in optimization, where I have developed two state-of-the-art heuristic algorithms to solve a class of NP-hard problems. We have now developed an R package RankAggSIgFUR (rank-agg-cipher) for the same, it can be found on github.