Variable Angle Tow (VAT) placement allows the designer to tailor the stiffness of composite structure to enhance the structural response under prescribed loading conditions. The Differential Quadrature Method (DQM) is investigated for performing buckling analysis of VAT panels. The governing differential equations are derived for the in-plane and buckling analysis of symmetric VAT plate based on classical laminated plate theory. DQM was applied to solve the buckling problem of simply supported VAT plates subjected to uniform edge compression and the results are compared with finite element analysis. In this work, Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) curves are used to model the fibre path by modifying the control points within the domain of the plate. Genetic algorithm (GA) has been coupled with DQM to determine the optimal tow path for improving the buckling performance.