Rakesh Kapania reappointed to the Norris and Wendy Mitchell Professorship
Rakesh Kapania, Mitchell Professor in the Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been reappointed to the Norris and Wendy Mitchell Professorship in Aerospace Engineering by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.
The Norris and Wendy Mitchell Professorship was established in 2006 with a generous gift from Norris and Wendy Mitchell.
Since 2021, when he was last reappointed to the professorship, Kapania has continued to distinguish himself by pursuing world-class research in several key areas, including unitized structures, multidisciplinary design of truss-braced aircraft, highly flexible wings, use of machine learning in solving inverse problems, and composite structures.
His record of attracting research sponsorship includes sustained sponsorship over decades with funding from a wide range of federal agencies and the private sector, as well as leadership of multiple large center-level grants. He has authored more than 240 journal articles, including 37 published since 2021, as well as more than 390 conference papers and three book chapters. Two additional book chapters are currently in press. Kapania’s publications have received more than 11,000 citations, with an h-index of 51 and an i10-index of 244.
Kapania has served as major professor to 20 postdoctoral fellows, 60 Ph.D. students, and 80 master’s students. Many of these students now hold professional positions of significant importance in academia, industry, and government laboratories.
In recognition of his work and impact, he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). In 2025, he was appointed editor-in-chief of the AIAA’s Journal of Aircraft. In 2016 he received the AIAA Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Award for significant contributions in the multidisciplinary design optimization of truss-braced aircraft, efficient supersonic air vehicles, and for pioneering the multidisciplinary design optimization of wings with curvilinear spars and ribs.
Kapania received a bachelor’s degree from Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh, an M.S. from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and a Ph.D. from Purdue University.
