Masoud Nobahar

Postdoctoral Researcher at Louisiana State University

When I received word that I had been accepted into Tandon’s Faculty First-Look program, I was very excited for the opportunity and especially for the chance to potentially see Magued Iskander, who chairs the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering in Brooklyn and whose research works are interesting to me; his expertise in the field is widely recognized, and he is known to be a great mentor.

My academic trajectory was launched by another person I admired greatly; growing up in Iran, my best friend’s father was a civil engineer who graduated from Oxford during the 1950s, and he deeply inspired me. I earned my bachelor’s degree from the Sharif University of Technology in 2009 and remained there for my master’s degree, which I earned two years later under the direction of Dr. Morteza Eskandari, , a structural research engineer with great experience in Continuum and Fracture Mechanics. My dissertation involved love waves, which are surface waves that move parallel to the Earth’s surface.

In 2022 I received my doctoral degree in Geotechnical Engineering at Jackson State University in Mississippi, where my advisor was Dr. Mohammad Sadik Khan, who is known for his work on sustainable infrastructure, transportation geotechnics, and retaining structures. In Mississippi, highway slopes are often constructed on high-plasticity clay, and they can fail in certain instances, such as when there’s heavy rain. I researched ways to predict slope failure and take early action before it occurs. That work won me the university’s outstanding dissertation award.

Since 2023, I’ve been conducting post-doctoral research at Louisiana State University’s Transportation Research Center, which partners with the state government on projects. It’s exciting work, and I’m equally excited to see where my geotechnical interests take me next.