Deb is the Herman E. & Ruth J. Koenig Endowed Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computing Engineering at Michigan State University.
Deb has been awarded the Infosys Prize in Engineering and Computer Science from Infosys Limited, Bangalore, India for his contributions to evolutionary multi-objective optimization, which have led to "advances in non-linear constraints, decision uncertainty, programming and numerical methods, computational efficiency of large-scale problems, and optimization algorithms.
For his next position, he left for the Michigan State University, where has been the Herman E. & Ruth J. Koenig Endowed Chair since 2013.
In 1994, Deb and coauthor Nidamarthi Srinivas introduced one of[note 1] the first nondominated-sorting genetic algorithms, which they termed "NSGA".
[15][16] In 2013, Deb and coauthor Himanshu Jain proposed a modification of NSGA-II for solving many-objective optimization problems with 10+ objectives.