Professor B. K. Bala is the dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Science and Technology University, Gopalganj, Bangladesh, and was a professor in the Department of Farm Power and Machinery, Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh, Bangladesh, where he was engaged in teaching and research for over 42 years starting from 1970. He has supervised more than a dozen PhD students in the areas of drying and storage of agro products, modeling of food security, modeling of integrated energy systems and energy policy, renewable energy, modeling of climate change impacts, and emerging technologies such as neural network, exergy, genetic algorithm, and computational fluid dynamics. Professor Bala received a B.Sc. (Eng.) degree from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1969 and an M.Eng. degree from the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand, in 1975. Professor Bala also received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, in 1983 and worked on modeling and simulation of heat and mass transfer during industrial deep-bed drying of malt and provided the foundation and basis for energy conservation and online control of industrial deep bed drying of malt. He also worked on solar drying as an EC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, from 1992 to 1993. He was on a DAAD study visit at the Institute of Agricultural Engineering in the Tropics and Subtropics, University of Hohenheim, Germany, for research on solar drying in 1995. Professor Bala also served as a research fellow at the Institute of Agricultural and Food Policy Research, Universiti Putra Malaysia from 2012 to 2014. Professor Bala has published 207 scientific papers mostly in high-impact factor journals, and he is also the author of nine textbooks. He is the author of Drying and Storage of Cereal Grains published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2017, and he is the co-author of System Dynamics Modeling and Simulation published by Springer in 2017.
