I am an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Nevada Reno. My academic background is in civil engineering, and I was primarily trained as a computational solid mechanics and geotechnical earthquake engineer. However, my research interests lay at the intersection of engineering and science, reaching across fields of geotechnical and structural engineering, earth sciences, computational mechanics, and applied mathematics and statistics. As an educator and mentor, I am interested in helping students equip themselves with the skill sets they need to live their professional dreams.

I hold a Ph.D. in civil engineering (2016) from the University of California, Los Angeles, an M.S. in earthquake engineering (2009), and a B.S. in civil engineering (2007) from the Sharif University of Technology. Before joining UNR, I was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology (2017-2019).

Research

My research focuses on developing and testing new techniques and methodologies to improve and accelerate physics-based learning, modeling, and uncertainty quantification in geosystems. Broadly, I am interested in achieving the synergy among mechanistic modeling, distributed sensing, scientific machine learning, and high-performance computing to understand better the built environment’s interaction with natural/induced hazards taking interdependencies and uncertainties into account, and using the improved understanding to devise and train predictive models for engineering applications from design to decision making.

Examples of our ongoing efforts are:

• Uncertainty quantification in geosystems
• Geosystem monitoring and characterization
• Shallow crust characterization and modeling
• Foundation engineering for seismic wave manipulation

Software

• seismo-VLAB: I am one of the developers of seismo-VLAB, an open-source finite element software for wave propagation and soil-structure interaction modeling. For more details please check the software website.