Abstract of the talk: Over the past two decades, we have been witness to a vast upsurge of technologies that rely on wave physics and these have taken center stage in our lives; a partial list includes autonomous vehicles, communication devices, hearables, piezo-electric sensors/devices, structural health monitoring, and so on. But as we look forward into the future, there are a plethora of technical advances (both ongoing and on the dock) that will change our way of life and interaction with each other. These range from autonomous vehicles to light matter interaction to optical holography and so on. One enabler to this rapid growth has been simulation tools; indeed, in a significant departure from past practice, the design flow starts on a computer. As a result, commercial tools have had an outsized role.

B. Shanker received his B'Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India in 1989, M.S. and Ph.D in 1992 and 1993, respectively, from the Pennsylvania State University. From 1993 to 1996 he was a research associate in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Iowa State University where he worked on the Molecular Theory of Optical Activity. From 1996 to 1999 he was with the Center for Computational Electromagnetics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Visiting Assistant Professor, and from 1999-2002 with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University as an Assistant Professor. Currently, he is a University Distinguished Professor (an honor accorded to about 2% of MSU faculty members) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan State University, and the Department of Physics and Astronomy. From 2015-2018,  he was appointed Associate Chair of the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering, a new department at MSU and was a key player in building this Department.  Earlier he served as the Associate Chair for Graduate Studies in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2012-2015, and currently is the Associate Chair for Research in ECE. He has authored/co-authored around 450 journal and conference papers and presented a number of invited talks. His research interests include all aspects of computational electromagnetics (frequency and time domain integral equation based methods, multi-scale fast multipole methods, fast transient methods, higher order finite element and integral equation methods), propagation in complex media, mesoscale electromagnetics, and particle and molecular dynamics as applied to multiphysics and multiscale problems. He was an Associate Editor for IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters (AWPL) and IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, is the Topical Editor for Journal of Optical Society of America: A, and is a full member of the USNC-URSI Commission B. He is Fellow of IEEE, elected for his contributions in computational electromagnetics. He has also been awarded the Withrow Distinguished Junior scholar (in 2003), Withrow Distinguished Senior scholar (in 2010), the Withrow teaching award (in 2007), and the Beal Outstanding Faculty award (2014).