It is with much sadness that we announce the passing of Dr Garret N. Vanderplaats, founder of our long standing partner, Vanderplaats Research & Development Inc. Gary was both a business partner and friend to us at GRM with our Managing Director, Martin Gambling working closely with Gary in the 18 years that we have been partners.

Gary was one of the key founders of numerical optimisation methods and a pioneer in bringing the application of these to the engineering community. Having been instrumental in the development of MSC/Nastran’s SOL200 design optimisation solution, Gary took the decision to begin VR&D with the aim of making optimisation methods commonplace in the engineering community.

Planning for a future that allowed his lifelong ambition of seeing optimisation adopted throughout engineering, Gary appointed a successor to his role as CEO of VR&D in early 2021. Through this appointment and the rebranding of VR&D to OmniQuest, the technology he pioneered and the products his company created can continue to develop and prosper. Sharing Gary’s passion for applying optimisation technology to industry, we at GRM would like to celebrate the contribution he made in his field. Working with the team at OmniQuest, we look forward to continuing with Gary’s vision of making engineering design optimisation commonplace.