Dr. Murali Natarajan Kadiramangalam founded South Deccan Archaeology Foundation in late 2024. He obtained a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from M.S. University of Baroda and subsequently Masters, Doctorate and Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Applied Sciences from New York University. He was the Link Space Industrialization Fellow for the year 1990 and written up in Who’s Who in Science & Engineering for his doctoral research. Subsequently, he led a team of researchers at Fluent Inc., who provided consulting, software, and technical support to customers for CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) in materials processing. Giving up his green card and US citizenship approval, he returned to the shores of India in 2000. In Pune, Dr. Murali established the world-class R&D Centre of Fluent Inc., that developed software and provided technical services in CFD to customers world-wide (Fluent India Private Ltd.). He was appointed Managing Director of ANSYS India, Bangalore in 2008 (subsidiary of the global leader in simulation), where he expanded research to the areas of Stress Analysis (FEA), electromagnetic simulations and amalgamated the Fluent and ANSYS entities in India. In 2011, Dr. Murali was given responsibility for the ANSYS Inc. global academic program, which involved assisting engineering schools to adopt multiphysics simulation in their research and teaching, leading to improved employability of students and enhanced research output of faculty. After a successful stint at ANSYS, Dr. Murali left industry in 2016 to pursue his longstanding interest in researching Adi Sankara from an archaeological standpoint. He joined Deccan College Post-Graduate Research Institute, Pune in 2016 and completed an M.Phil. in archaeology; his research was focused on determining the identity of Maharishi Patanjali through archaeological field surveys, iconography, epigraphy, study of temple architecture, Tamil, and Sanskrit texts. His thesis was subsequently published as a book entitled “The Tradition of the Yogasūtrakāra-Mahābhāṣyakāra Patañjali of Tamil̤akam (Identity of the Yoga-Grammarian Sage Patañjali as Noticed in Tamil Nadu & Kerala)” and released in late 2022. He extended his research on the same topic and completed post-doctoral research at Deccan College. Next, he worked on the evolution of the Nataraja icon and worship in Chidambaram and beyond; the research paper on this topic has been published in 2023 by the “Berlin Indological Studies” journal, Germany in. In 2023, Dr. Murali was awarded the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute-Infosys Fellowship for conducting archaeological field surveys regarding Adi Sankara in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, which has since been completed. At present, he is continuing advanced field exploration regarding Adi Sankara in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Dr. Murali has authored several papers on archaeology / Indology, presented at conferences and also given invited talks.