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      <span class="brand-text">Kalyanmoy Deb<span>University of Alabama</span></span>
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    <div class="breadcrumb"><a href="index.html">Home</a> / Biography</div>
    <span class="kicker">Biography</span>
    <h1>From Tripura to Tuscaloosa, and back again</h1>
    <p class="lede">
      A career that began with a doctorate at the University of Alabama now returns to it,
      four decades and hundreds of thousands of citations later.
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      <p>
        Kalyanmoy Deb was born in 1963 in Tripura, India, and grew up between Agartala and
        Calcutta. He earned a Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from the
        Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 1985, then spent two years as an
        assistant engineer at Engineers India Limited in New Delhi before turning to
        research full time.
      </p>
      <p>
        In 1987 he moved to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa to study under
        David E. Goldberg, one of the founders of the modern field of genetic algorithms.
        He completed a Master of Science in Engineering Mechanics in 1989 and a Doctor of
        Philosophy in Engineering Mechanics in 1991, with a dissertation on Boolean and
        floating point function optimization using messy genetic algorithms. During this
        period he also worked as a visiting research assistant professor at the
        University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
      </p>
      <p>
        In 1993 he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute
        of Technology Kanpur, where he built the Kanpur Genetic Algorithms Laboratory
        (KanGAL) into one of the world's leading research groups in evolutionary
        computation. It was at IIT Kanpur, working with students including Amrit Pratap,
        Sameer Agarwal, and T. Meyarivan, that he developed NSGA-II in 2000, an algorithm
        that remains one of the most cited papers in the history of the IEEE Transactions
        on Evolutionary Computation and is used across engineering, economics, and
        machine learning today.
      </p>
      <p>
        In 2011 he moved to Michigan State University as the Koenig Endowed Chair
        Professor, holding joint appointments across the Departments of Electrical and
        Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, and Mechanical
        Engineering. He founded the Computational Optimization and Innovation (COIN)
        Laboratory there in 2012, was named University Distinguished Professor in 2021,
        and continued a stream of research that produced NSGA-III, Innovization, and
        machine learning assisted optimization methods used well beyond academia,
        including by Ford, General Motors, Google, and Northrop Grumman.
      </p>
      <p>
        Kalyanmoy Deb now joins the University of Alabama as the Endowed Shelby
        Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science, bringing his
        research program back to the campus where his doctoral studies began in 1987.
      </p>
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      <span class="kicker">Career</span>
      <h2>Education and principal appointments</h2>
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        <div class="when">2026 to Present</div>
        <h4>Endowed Shelby Distinguished Professor</h4>
        <p>Department of Computer Science, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.</p>
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        <div class="when">2012 to Present</div>
        <h4>Director, COIN Laboratory</h4>
        <p>Founded the Computational Optimization and Innovation Laboratory at Michigan State University, successor to KanGAL.</p>
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        <div class="when">2021 to 2026</div>
        <h4>University Distinguished Professor</h4>
        <p>Michigan State University. Also Koenig Endowed Chair Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (2011 to 2026); Professor, Computer Science and Engineering and Mechanical Engineering (2011 to 2026).</p>
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        <div class="when">1999 to 2011</div>
        <h4>Director, Kanpur Genetic Algorithms Laboratory (KanGAL)</h4>
        <p>Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.</p>
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        <div class="when">1993 to 2012</div>
        <h4>Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor</h4>
        <p>Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India.</p>
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        <div class="when">1991 to 1992</div>
        <h4>Visiting Research Assistant Professor</h4>
        <p>Department of General Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.</p>
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        <div class="when">1991</div>
        <h4>PhD, Engineering Mechanics</h4>
        <p>University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Dissertation: "Boolean and floating-point function optimization using messy genetic algorithms," advised by David E. Goldberg.</p>
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        <div class="when">1989</div>
        <h4>MS, Engineering Mechanics</h4>
        <p>University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Thesis: "Multi-modal function optimization using genetic algorithms."</p>
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        <div class="when">1985 to 1987</div>
        <h4>Assistant Engineer</h4>
        <p>Engineers India Limited, New Delhi.</p>
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      <div class="timeline-item">
        <div class="when">1985</div>
        <h4>BTech, Mechanical Engineering</h4>
        <p>Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India.</p>
      </div>

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      <span class="kicker">Further Reading</span>
      <h2>Full curriculum vitae</h2>
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      For a complete record of appointments, editorial roles, funded projects, keynote
      lectures, and publications, download the full curriculum vitae.
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    <a class="btn btn-primary" href="assests/kdeb-cv.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
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        <h4>Kalyanmoy Deb</h4>
        <p style="color:#b8b8b8; max-width:38ch; font-size:0.92rem;">
          Endowed Shelby Distinguished Professor, Department of Computer Science,
          University of Alabama.
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        <h4>Site</h4>
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        <h4>Reach Him</h4>
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      <span>&copy; <span id="footer-year">2026</span> Kalyanmoy Deb. All rights reserved.</span>
      <span>Tuscaloosa, Alabama</span>
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