Dr. Rangarajan Pitchumani is the George R. Goodson Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech, USA. Dr. Pitchumani received his PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992 and a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the IIT Bombay in 1986.nnPrior to joining Virginia Tech, he was with the University of Delaware and the University of Connecticut. Dr. Pitchumani served as the Director of Graduate Studies and as the Department Head at the University of Connecticut and as the Associate Department Head for Research at Virginia Tech. From 2011–2015, he served in an invitational role as the Chief Scientist for the SunShot Initiative at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), where he was the Founding Director of the SunShot Concentrating Solar Power program and the Director of the Systems Integration program. In his role at the DOE, he defined bold national goals for achieving cost-competitive solar energy technologies and their ubiquitous integration into the electric grid.