Kalyanmoy Deb

Deb was born in 1963 in Udaipur, Tripura, then the smallest state of India. He received his B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering (1985) from IIT Kharagpur and his MS (1989) and PhD (1991) in Engineering Mechanics from the University of Alabama. His PhD advisor was David E. Goldberg, and his PhD thesis was titled Binary and Floating-Point Function Optimization using Messy Genetic Algorithms. From 1991 to 1992 he was a postdoc at UIUC. In 1993, he became a professor of mechanical engineering at IIT Kanpur, where he went on to hold the Deva Raj Endowed Chair (2007–2010) and the Gurmukh and Veena Mehta Endowed Chair (2011–2013). For his next position, he left for the Michigan State University, where has been the Herman E. & Ruth J. Koenig Endowed Chair since 2013 and was named University Distinguished Professor in 2021. ==Research==

NSGA Deb is a highly cited researcher, with 234,000+ Google Scholar citations and an h-index of 146. genetic algorithms for multiobjective optimization. In 1994, Deb and coauthor Nidamarthi Srinivas introduced one of the first nondominated-sorting genetic algorithms, which they termed "NSGA". NSGA-II In 2002, Deb and coauthors Amrit Pratap, Sameer Agarwal, and T.A.M.T. Meyarivan introduced a notion of crowding distance for an individual, which "calculates a measure of how close an individual is to its neighbors." They also introduced a faster way to implement nondominated sorting, by for every individual keeping track of which other individuals it strictly dominates. By incorporating crowding distance, elitism, and the faster implementation of nondominated sorting into the original NSGA, Deb and his coauthors modified the original NSGA and made it faster and more reliable. They termed this modification "NSGA-II". According to the Web of Science Core Collection database, this paper was the first paper solely by Indian authors to have more than 5,000 citations. As of 2025, the paper has accumulated over 65,000 citations. They termed this modification "NSGA-III". ==Awards and honors==

Deb is a Fellow of three Indian academies: the Indian National Academy of Engineering (2004), the Indian Academy of Sciences (2006), the Indian National Science Academy (2011). He is also a fellow of the IEEE (2012), the ASME (2014), and the ACM (2022). He has been awarded the Infosys Prize in Engineering and Computer Science (2011) for his contributions to evolutionary multi-objective optimization, and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award (2018) for his sustained contributions to evolutionary multi-objective optimization. Other honors include a Humboldt Fellowship (1998–1999), the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2002), the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Sciences (2005), service as a Finland Distinguished Professor (FiDiPro) from 2007 to 2009, the MCDM Edgeworth-Pareto Award (2008) for contributions to multiple-criteria decision making, the J. C. Bose National Fellowship (2011), and an honorary doctorate from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland (2013). ==Notes==