Dr. Pratyush Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at IIT Kharagpur. Before joining as an Assistant Professor, he was a joint Post-doctoral researcher at Texas A&M (in the Department of Mechanical Engineering) and UNT (CAAAM). There he was broadly working on (1) the crystal plasticity model for fatigue life prediction, (2) modeling fracture in quasi-brittle materials, and (3) the experimental and numerical simulations of the functionally graded materials (FGMs). Before that, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Galway on an EU/SFI-funded project, where he developed a physics-informed neural network tool to predict deformation in soft solids. Prior to joining the University of Galway, he worked as a post-doctoral equivalent fellow for six months at IIT Madras. He completed his PhD from the Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Madras, where he worked on developing an algorithm to accurately measure non-uniform strain through a non-contact technique. He completed his M.Tech. and B.Tech. from the IIT Patna and Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kerala, respectively. His research interests lie in continuum and experimental mechanics, numerical techniques, machine learning, PINNs, and structural and earthquake engineering. 

Department of Civil Engineering

IIT Kharagpur

Joining: March 2026

Project: Experimental and numerical analysis of functionally graded materials

Supervisor(s): Prof. J. N. Reddy

      Prof. Narendra Dahotre (CAAAM at UNT)

      Prof. Arun Srinivasa