Amit Acharya is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and is a member of the Mechanics, Materials, and Computing (MMC) research group. His research interests are in the areas of continuum mechanics, mathematical materials science, and applied mathematics. Acharya looks at how structural imperfections, or defects, in crystalline materials interact and evolve. Currently, his work focuses on theoretical and computational defect mechanics in crystalline, liquid crystalline, and metallic glass systems, coarse-graining of nonlinear time-dependent systems, and the interplay of differential geometry and structural mechanics in the design and actuation of thin sheets.

Acharya received his Ph.D. in Theoretical & Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1994. Subsequently, he completed a postdoctoral position at the University of Pennsylvania.

From 1995-1998, he took a position as a senior research engineer in the ABAQUS Std Development group at HKS, Inc. (now Simulia, Dassault Systèmes) in Providence, RI. While there, Acharya was the lead developer of the Hysteresis nonlinear viscoelastic material model and the S4 fully-integrated finite strain shell element. These are still in use in the ABAQUS general-purpose FE code. Between 1998-2000, Acharya was a research scientist at the DOE-ASCI funded Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets at UIUC before joining CMU in 2000.