Dr. Richard Malak is Associate Professor and Gulf Oil/Thomas A. Dietz Career Development Professor I in the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University. His research interests include decision making in engineering design and systems engineering (decomposition, delegation, etc.) and the application of computational techniques (optimization, machine learning, AI) to support engineering decision making. Recent applications of his work include morphing supersonic aircraft, functionally graded alloy design and resilient systems of systems. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from SUNY Stony Brook, an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. From August 2016 to January 2019, Dr. Malak served as Program Director for the Engineering Design and Systems Engineering (EDSE) program in the division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) of the National Science Foundation. He is the recipient of several awards for teaching and research, including multiple best paper awards from the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences (IDETC) and Computers and Information in Engineering (CIE) conference.