Dr. Sivasambu Mahesh has been at IITM in the Aerospace Engineering department since August 2013. He received a B. Tech from IIT Madras and Ph D from Cornell University. Thereafter he was a post-doc at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for three years and an Assistant and Associate Professor at IIT Kanpur for about nine years. He studies the relations between microstructure and macroscopic mechanical properties (plasticity and fracture) in crystalline materials, composites and gels.