Rakesh Nagi is Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He served as the Department Head of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering (2013-2019). He also served as the Interim Director of the Illinois Applied Research Institute (2016 –2018). He is an affiliate faculty in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Coordinated Science Laboratory, and Computational Science and Engineering. Previously he served as the Chair (2006-2012) and Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) (1993-2013). He is a recipient of IISE David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award (2022), INFORMS Koopman Award from Military Application Society (2021, 2018), DARPA Graph Challenge, Champion (2020), 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). Dr. Nagi's recent research interests are in GPU-accelerated algorithms for discrete optimization and graph analytics.