Professor Rakesh Nagi
Head of Pillar, Engineering Systems and Design
Rakesh Nagi is Professor and Head of the Engineering Systems and Design Pillar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. He joined in August 2023. He is also Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (on leave). He served as the Department Head of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at UIUC (2013-2019). He also served as the Interim Director of the Illinois Applied Research Institute (2016-2018). He is an affiliate faculty in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Coordinated Science Laboratory, Computational Science and Engineering, and Discovery Partners Initiative at UIUC.
Previously he served as the Chair (2006-2012) and Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) (1993-2013). He received his PhD (1991) and MS (1989) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park, while he worked at the Institute for Systems Research and INRIA, France, and BE (1987) degree in Mechanical Engineering from University of Roorkee (now Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee), India.
Rakesh is a recipient of the IISE David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award (2022), INFORMS Koopman Award from Military Application Society (2021, 2018), DARPA Graph Challenge, Champion (2020), Honorable Mention (2017, 2019), Finalist (2018), Innovation Award (2018, 2019), IIE Transactions on Design and Manufacturing, Best paper award from journal issues from July 2011 through June 2012 (2013), IIE Fellow Award (2010), University at Buffalo’s Sustained Achievement Award (2009), Buffalo Business First's 40 under 40 award (2004), SME's Milton C. Shaw Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award (1999), IIE's Outstanding Young Industrial Engineer Award in Academia (1999), and National Science Foundation's CAREER Award (1996).
His papers have been published in journals including IIE Transactions, International Journal of Production Research, Journal of Manufacturing Systems, International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems, Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, Computers in Industry, Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems, Management Science, Operations Research, Naval Research Logistics, European Journal of Operational Research, Annals of Operations Research, Computers and Operations Research, Computers and Industrial Engineering, and ASME and IEEE Transactions. Rakesh's major research thrusts are in applied/military operations research and production/manufacturing systems. His research interests are in Big Graphs, High-level Information Fusion, Location theoretic approaches to Facilities Design, Production Management and Scheduling, Agile Manufacturing and Information-Based Manufacturing.