Rate My Professor Natarajan S.

Sundararajan Natarajan is a Professor and Pandurangan Faculty Fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He joined the Machine Design Section as an Assistant Professor in 2014. He earned his PhD in 2011 from the Institute of Mechanics and Advanced Materials at Cardiff School of Engineering, Cardiff University, UK, under the supervision of Professor Stéphane PA Bordas and Dr. Pierre Kerfriden. Prior to his PhD, he obtained a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Bharathiar University in 1999. Before joining IIT Madras, he held postdoctoral research fellowships at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney (2012–2014) and the Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (2011–2012). He also worked in the rotating parts center of excellence at GE-Aviation, India Technology Centre, Bangalore, from 2003 to 2008.

His research focuses on computational mechanics, including the development and application of advanced discretization techniques such as the extended finite element method (XFEM), virtual element method (VEM), scaled boundary finite element method (SBFEM), isogeometric analysis, and meshless methods for solving partial differential equations, with applications to moving boundary problems, multiphysics and multiscale frameworks, composite materials, functionally graded materials, thin-walled structures, and fracture mechanics. He has authored the book Partition of Unity Methods (Wiley, 2023) with co-authors Stéphane PA Bordas and Alexander Menk. Natarajan has received several honors, including the Zienkiewicz Best PhD Prize from the Association of Computational Mechanics in Engineering (UK) in 2011, the Pandurangan Faculty Fellow award at IIT Madras in 2025, and various travel awards and student paper recognitions. He teaches courses including Finite Element Analysis and Computational Methods in Engineering.