Dr. Narayanan joined Wright State University (WSU) in Fall 1994 and became an associate professor in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at WSU in 1999. He was promoted to the rank of Professor in 2002, and was named permanent Chair of the Department of Biomedical, Industrial & Human Factors Engineering on September 1, 2002. He received his Ph.D. in industrial and systems engineering from The Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta in 1994. His research interests are in the area of designing interactive systems to aid humans in performing cognitively complex tasks such as planning, information retrieval and synthesis, and troubleshooting. His research has an interdisciplinary thrust with the following themes: cognition, computational representation, interactivity, and application. Domains of application of his research include discrete manufacturing, Air Force Logistics, aviation, and navigation through heterogeneous information sources. He is also the Executive Director of the Wright State Research Institute.

He received his bachelors degree in mechanical engineering from the Regional Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur, India in 1987 and the M.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta in 1989 and 1991, respectively. He received his doctoral degree in industrial and systems engineering from Georgia Tech in 1994. He is a member of Association for Computing Machinery, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, and the Institute of Industrial Engineers. He is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biolgical Engineering.

He serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics and The International Journal of Modeling and Simulation. He became a registered professional engineer in the State of Ohio in 1996.