Dr. Sankaran Mahadevan is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Vanderbilt University. He is also the director of an NSF-funded Interdisciplinary Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program in risk and reliability engineering and management at Vanderbilt University. His research contributions include model-based simulation, reliability and risk assessment, optimization and model validation. He has applied these methods to civil structures, composite materials, automobile systems, aircraft and space vehicles, and human reliability modeling, funded by NASA, DOD, DOE, NSF, GM, DaimlerChrysler, and Sandia and Idaho National Laboratories.