Professor Ramesh K. Agarwal is the William Palm Professor of Engineering in the department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Washington University in St. Louis. From 1994 to 2001, he was the Sam Bloomfield Distinguished Professor and Executive Director of the National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University in Kansas. From 1978 to 1994, he was the Program Director and McDonnell Douglas Fellow at McDonnell Douglas Research Laboratories in St. Louis. Dr. Agarwal received Ph.D in Aeronautical Sciences from Stanford University in 1975, M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1969 and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India in 1968. Over a period of forty five years, Professor Agarwal has worked in various areas of Computational Science and Engineering - Computational Fluid Dynamics, Computational Materials Science, Computational Acoustics and Electromagnetics, Control and Systems Theory, and Multidisciplinary Design and Optimization. He is the author and coauthor of over 600 journal and refereed conference publications. He has given many plenary, keynote and invited lectures at various national and international conferences worldwide in over fifty countries. Professor Agarwal continues to serve on many academic, government, and industrial advisory committees. Dr. Agarwal is a Fellow twenty two societies including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), American Physical Society (APS), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), Royal Aeronautical Society, Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics (CSAA), and American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). He has received many prestigious honors and national/international awards from various professional societies and organizations for his research contributions including the AIAA Reeds Aeronautics Award, SAE Medal of Honor, ASME Honorary Membership and Honorary Fellowship from Royal Aeronautical Society.