Dhananjay Thiruvady is Associate Head of School (Industry Research) and Associate Professor in Mathematics and Optimisation at Deakin University. Since completing his Ph.D in Optimisation (Monash University, 2012), he has worked at the interface of academia and industry. He develops techniques in artificial intelligence and operations research and applies these in the application areas of mining, logistics, health, biosecurity and agriculture. He has published over 70 papers in high-ranked conferences and journals in evolutionary computation and operations research. He has previously been on the program committee of the Australasian Data Mining Conference (AusDM), the International Conference on Swarm Intelligence (ANTS), the Genetic and Evolutionary Programming Conference (GECCO), and Hybrid Metaheuristics. His teaching spans industry-oriented units to algorithms and computer programming, for which he has achieved multiple awards.