I am Balaji Shankar Venkatachari, a Doctoral student in the deparment of Mechanical Engineering at UAB. My specialization is in the area of Computational fluid dynamics (CFD), under the advisory of Dr. Gary Cheng. More details about my research can be found in the Research section of my webpage. For other trivial info about me, read on....

    I hail from Tamilnadu, a southern state in India. I grew up in Chennai (formerly Madras), a metropolitan city with a population of 4,352,932 along the Bay of Bengal. To speak about Chennai, it is one of those places where those deep roots of Indian culture & serenity blend with the hustle & bustle of modernity. My schooling was done at D.A.V Senior secondary school, where my fundamentals of science, mathematics & everything else under the sun was built under the guidance of enthusiastic & motivating teachers. I still cherish the days I had spent there, especially my high- school mathematics class with Ms. Lalitha Thiagarajan , Chemistry class under Ms. Radha Ramabhadran, Tamil (mother tongue) under Ms. Vijayalakshmi, and several other classes like Physics, English etc. Not to mention the wonderful sets of friends I found, who now lay scattered all around the globe.

    For my Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering (B.Tech) I moved to Pondicherry Engineering college in Pondicherry. Pondicherry, a coastal town, was once a part of French occupied territory. Hence, to date you can see a blend of Indo- French architecture with homes painted in "pure white & gray" & roads that cut each other at ninety degrees. It is also home to the world's first UNESCO setup International Town Auroville. Basically, a calm , serene & spiritual sea town (To know more about Pondicherry, read Life of Pi - Yann Martel). It was a great period in my life, as it was the first time that, I was away from my home & parents. A period of learning in that long road to maturity & where once again I was lucky to have found the company of some wonderful but crazy set of friends. After my graduation, I worked for a brief while at Whirlpool of India Ltd, Pondicherry , following which  I landed at Birmingham, Alabama in the Fall of 2002 to start  my life as a graduate student.