2025 marks literary milestones for Ahlawat and Jones

Two MechSE alumni, Samit Ahlawat (MSME 2006) and Virginia Tech Professor Emeritus Robert Jones (BSCE 1960, MSCE 1961, PhD TAM 1964), reached literary milestones this year.

Ahlawat’s recent textbook, Statistical Quantitative Methods in Finance: From Theory to Quantitative Portfolio Management (Springer), became available on Amazon last month. Ahlawat, who became a portfolio manager at qSpark Capital Management in 2024 after serving for seven years as Vice President at J.P. Morgan, is also the author of Reinforcement Learning for Finance: Solve Problems in Finance with CNN and RNN Using the TensorFlow Library (Apress).

This year also marks the 50^th anniversary of Jones’ first textbook, Mechanics of Composite Materials (CRC Press), now in its second edition. Following his retirement from Virginia Tech’s Department of Mechanical Engineering in 2000 (Jones joined as a Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics in 1981), he went on to publish Buckling of Bars, Plates, and Shells; Deformation Theory of Plasticity; and Design of Composite Structures through his own publishing company, Bull Ridge Publishing.