Group members

Dr. Maryam Fathhifar	Dr. Sam Sengupta

Ajay is a Lecturer* in Engineering Simulation and Data Science (equivalent to Assistant Professor) in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Manchester (UK) since 2022. He started at Manchester in Jan-2022 and was cleared probation/tenure in 2024. He is also currently the Deputy Head of post-graduate students since Aug-2024.

Ajay earned a B.Tech in Mechanical engineering in 2007 from NITK Surathkal (India); and an MS in Aeronautics in 2008 from California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He then moved to the Institute of Continuum Mechanics at the Leibniz University Hannover, where he studied continuum contact mechanics of soft materials with Peter Wriggers and obtained his PhD in Mechanical engineering in 2018. His postdoctoral training was in Civil and Environmental engineering at UC Berkeley (2020-22), where he studied uncertainty quantification in wave-structure interaction with Sanjay Govindjee and also work with R L Taylor.

He is leading professional activities for a number of scientific societies and agencies, including serving on the Early career editorial board of Extreme Mechanics Letters. Among the other awards, he was awarded the Ramanujan Fellowship, Trustworthy AI Fellowship by the Alan Turning Institute among others.

*Lecturer in the UK is equivalent to, globally more common, Assistant Professor rank in USA. For more information, check out "Academic titles in UK"