Diwakar Shukla is a Blue Waters assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also an affiliate faculty in the Center for Biophysics and Computational biology, Computational Science & Engineering Program, Plant Biology and National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He started his research career at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, India, where he received B. Tech and M. Tech. degrees in chemical engineering. He then joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering under guidance of Prof. Bernhardt Trout followed by a postdoc at Stanford University with Prof. Vijay Pande. He has received several awards for his research including the CoMSEF Graduate student award from AIChE, Peterson award from ACS, Innovation in Biotechnology award from AAPS, OpenEye outstanding junior faculty award in computational chemistry from ACS and the New Innovator Award from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research.