Morad Behandish

Morad Behandish (2016) is the Research Director for Digital Design and Manufacturing at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he oversees a multi-disciplinary research and commercialization program. He has also led the Computational Design area at PARC since he founded it in 2020 and has assembled a team of world-class scientists and engineers focused on designing the impossible. Behandish graduated with a master’s degree in CSE and a doctorate degree in ME, focused on incorporating the sense of touch in human-computer interaction with applications in mechanical assembly and drug design. His achievements were recognized by the Auran J. Fox entrepreneurship award from UConn Innovation Quest (iQ) and John Lof leadership award from UConn School of Engineering.

He joined the International Computer Science Institute of UC Berkeley in 2016 as a Postdoctoral Fellow to work on interoperability of computational design systems.

He joined PARC as a Research Scientist in 2017 to apply his expertise in geometric reasoning and computing to tackle design for hybrid additive and subtractive manufacturing. He expanded his research program at PARC in 2018-20 as a PI in multiple DARPA programs to developing design optimizers spanning system, assembly, and part-level analysis, building AI models that are grounded in physical first principles and democratizing computation for domain experts. During 2020-22, Behandish and his team supported advanced R&D for Xerox’s liquid metal 3D printing technology with process modeling and digital twin development. Behandish has also served the scientific community in various capacities such as an Editor of the CAD journal, Program Chair for the Solid and Physical Modeling symposia, EC member of the Solid Modeling Association, and judge/mentor for UConn iQ.