Raj Kumar Pal

Raj Kumar Pal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on elastic metamaterials, wave propagation, and computational mechanics. He holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2015), an M.E. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science (2008), and a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Trichy (2006).

His research interests span topological waveguides, granular media dynamics, and advanced numerical methods like discontinuous Galerkin techniques. He has pioneered studies on bound states in the continuum in architected materials and topological protection of elastic waves in metastructures. His work on moiré lattices and bilayer elastic plates has advanced applications in vibration control and structural health monitoring.

Pal has received notable awards including the NSF CAREER Award (2023), AFOSR YIP Award (2023), and Kansas State University’s Outstanding Assistant Professor Award (2023). His research has been published in top journals like Physical Review Applied, New Journal of Physics, and Granular Matter.

Current research themes include advection-diffusion flows, pattern formation in lattices, and tensegrity lattice mechanics. He leads a lab exploring mechanical resonators, nonlinear wave phenomena, and granular media mechanics, with applications in imaging and sensing technologies.