Rakesh is an Assistant Professor in Theoretical Chemistry/Physics at IISER Tirupati. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics with Prof. Biman Bagchi at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. Prior to joining IISER Tirupati,  he did postdoctoral research with Prof. Pablo Debenedetti at Princeton University (May 2014 - Sep. 2016), and with Prof.  Rigoberto Hernandez at Johns Hopkins University (Oct. 2016 - Feb. 2019). His research interests include anomalous behavior of supercooled liquids, phase transition in equilibrium and driven out-of-equilibrium systems, method development for robust coarse-graining of soft matter systems, and diffusion-controlled phenomena in condensed media.