Professor Yukio Nakajima received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Akron, in 1985. From 2000-2010 he was Director of the tire research division at the Bridgestone Corporation, where he developed technologies related to tire mechanics, such as noise, wear, maneuverability, RR, snow traction, and then went on to study the application of computational mechanics to tire design by combining FEA with optimization techniques. Since 2010 he has been a Professor at the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at Kogakuin University in Japan. His research interests include tire mechanics and computational mechanics.