NC State Univ Civil Eng Dept
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Brief Biography

Dr. S. Ranji Ranjithan is a Professor of Civil Engineering. He joined the Civil Engineering Department at North Carolina State University in 1995. He is also a faculty member in the Operations Research Program. He obtained his doctorate degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and worked as a research associate/engineer for three years prior to joining NC State. He has a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering and an MS degree in Industrial Engineering and Management.

His research interests are in the area of engineering systems analysis. Dr. Ranjithan is a member of the Water Resources & Environmental Engineering as well as the Computer Aided Engineering faculty groups within Civil Engineering. His primary areas of teaching and research focus on developing mathematical and computer-based procedures for modeling and analysis of engineering systems, and their implementations to aid decision makers explore and examine solutions to complex engineering problems. Specific topics include: Life-cycle-based Solid Waste Management; Water Resources Planning & Management; Transportation and Environmental Systems Analysis; System Identification/Inverse Modeling; Multi Objective Evolutionary Algorithms; Algorithms for Design Innovation; and Model Error Correction Procedures.

Current and recent areas of application include solid waste management, air quality management, groundwater monitoring and remediation, watershed management, animal waste management, non destructive testing of pavements and timber structures, and emergency evacuation management. Working in collaboration with fellow researchers, he focuses on approaching these problems from a multi disciplinary perspective. Most of his applications research attempt to integrate systems analytic methods with different computational paradigms to develop working prototypes of engineering decision support tools.

His research sponsors and collaborating agencies include the US EPA, NSF, Center for Transportation and the Environment, North Carolina Supercomputing Center/MCNC, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Research Triangle Institute, North Carolina Department of Transportation, and Transportation Research Board.