Dr. Akshai K. Runchal has over 50 years of experience in CFD and simulation of flow, heat and mass transport processes in engineering and environmental sciences, He obtained his Ph.D. in 1969 from Imperial College (London) under the guidance of Prof. D, B. Spalding. He was a key member of the 3-person team led by Spalding that invented the Finite Volume Method (FVM) of Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in mid 1960's. He started his professional career as a faculty at IIT Kanpur in 1969 and has also taught as regular or adjunct faculty at Imperial College (London), University of California (Los Angeles), Cal Tech (Pasadena), and Cal State (Northridge). In 1979, Dr. Runchal established the ACRi group of companies that has offices in Los Angeles (USA), Nice (France) and Bangalore (India).

For the past 50 years, Dr Runchal, has consulted extensively on projects related to flow, heat and mass transfer, combustion, environmental impact, management of air, surface and ground water resources, safe disposal of hazardous and nuclear waste, and, policy and decision analysis. Dr. Runchal is a co-author of the first book ever published on CFD. He is the author or co-author of 12 books and over 200 technical publications. He is the principal author of the ANSWER®, PORFLOW®, TIDAL®, and RADM™ CFD Software Tools that are widely employed by commercial, academic, and R&D organizations.

Dr. Runchal has received professional honours and awards and has delivered keynote and invited talks at more than 100 international conferences and seminars. In 2011, Dr. Runchal founded a non-profit CFD Virtual Reality Institute to further the cause of CFD education, training, and R&D.