Rakesh Nagi is Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering within the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He served as the Department Head from August 2013 to October 2019. From November 2016 through March 2018 he also served as the Interim Director of Illinois Applied Research Institute (ARI). He has affiliate appointments in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computational Science and Engineering, and Coordinated Science Lab.

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 Ph.D. (1991) and M.S. (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 B.E. (1987) degree in Mechanical Engineering from University of Roorkee (now IIT-R), India.

He is a recipient of INFORMS Koopman Award from Military Application Society (2018), DARPA Graph Challenge, 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), UB’s “Sustained Achievement Award” in recognition of outstanding achievements in scholarly activity (2009), Business First of Buffalo’s “40 under Forty” 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. Dr. Nagi’s major research thrust is in the area of production systems and applied/military operations research. His research interests are in Facilities Design; Operation of Production Systems; Agile Manufacturing; Sensor Networks, Military Applications, and Social Networks; and Accelerated GPU Computing, Big Data and Large-scale Combinatorial Optimization.