A career that began with a doctorate at the University of Alabama now returns to it, four decades and hundreds of thousands of citations later.
Kalyanmoy Deb was born in 1963 in Tripura, India, and grew up between Agartala and Calcutta. He earned a Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 1985, then spent two years as an assistant engineer at Engineers India Limited in New Delhi before turning to research full time.
In 1987 he moved to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa to study under David E. Goldberg, one of the founders of the modern field of genetic algorithms. He completed a Master of Science in Engineering Mechanics in 1989 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering Mechanics in 1991, with a dissertation on Boolean and floating point function optimization using messy genetic algorithms. During this period he also worked as a visiting research assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In 1993 he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, where he built the Kanpur Genetic Algorithms Laboratory (KanGAL) into one of the world's leading research groups in evolutionary computation. It was at IIT Kanpur, working with students including Amrit Pratap, Sameer Agarwal, and T. Meyarivan, that he developed NSGA-II in 2000, an algorithm that remains one of the most cited papers in the history of the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation and is used across engineering, economics, and machine learning today.
In 2011 he moved to Michigan State University as the Koenig Endowed Chair Professor, holding joint appointments across the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering. He founded the Computational Optimization and Innovation (COIN) Laboratory there in 2012, was named University Distinguished Professor in 2021, and continued a stream of research that produced NSGA-III, Innovization, and machine learning assisted optimization methods used well beyond academia, including by Ford, General Motors, Google, and Northrop Grumman.
Kalyanmoy Deb now joins the University of Alabama as the Endowed Shelby Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science, bringing his research program back to the campus where his doctoral studies began in 1987.
Department of Computer Science, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
Founded the Computational Optimization and Innovation Laboratory at Michigan State University, successor to KanGAL.
Michigan State University. Also Koenig Endowed Chair Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (2011 to 2026); Professor, Computer Science and Engineering and Mechanical Engineering (2011 to 2026).
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India.
Department of General Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Dissertation: "Boolean and floating-point function optimization using messy genetic algorithms," advised by David E. Goldberg.
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Thesis: "Multi-modal function optimization using genetic algorithms."
Engineers India Limited, New Delhi.
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India.
For a complete record of appointments, editorial roles, funded projects, keynote lectures, and publications, download the full curriculum vitae.
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