Meenakshisundaram Ravi Shankar is a Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. He holds a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology as well as an MS and PhD in industrial engineering, both from Purdue University. Broadly, his research interests are in the areas of mechanics, advanced manufacturing, and metamaterials. Current research efforts in his research group are focused on harnessing actuation from order–disorder transitions in liquid crystal elastomers, the exploitation of instabilities to power soft robots, and developing advanced manufacturing techniques to integrate active materials in freeform geometries. He was a winner of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers’ 2010 Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award, the 2014 Institute of Industrial Engineer’s Outstanding Early Career IE in Academia Award, and the Whiteford Faculty Fellowship.