In 2004, he joined the National Institute of Technology at Tiruchirappalli, from where he received his B. Tech. degree in Mechanical Engineering four years later. He was awarded the ‘Summer Undergraduate Research Grant for Excellence (SURGE)’ fellowship by the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 2007. As a SURGE fellow, he investigated the convective heat transfer due to fluid flow past discrete heater sources placed in a channel using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). In 2008, Rajan completed his senior thesis, which contains the results of a numerical investigation of fluid flow in a Y-shaped divided intake duct.