Department of Mechanical Engineering Welcomes New Faculty Members

Assistant professor Dr. Negin Koutahzadeh holds a Ph.D. from Tennessee Tech University. Her research interests include developing clean and sustainable technologies for removing and reducing environmental pollution and clean energy generation, low-temperature plasma processes, corona discharge, thermal desalination, surface engineering of polymeric membranes, food-energy-water nexus, and multiphase systems thermo-fluid.

Assistant professor Dr. Ali Pakniyat earned his Ph.D from McGill University and later held two postdoctoral positions in  the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. His research interests include deterministic and stochastic optimal control, nonlinear and hybrid systems, analytical mechanics and chaos, with applications in the automotive industry, sensors and actuators, and robotics.

Assistant professor Dr. Sree Kalyan Patiballa earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and served as a postdoctoral associate at Yale University prior to joining The University of Alabama in spring 2022. His research broadly investigates the nexus of design, manufacturing, and integration of mechanical metamaterials and soft robotics to develop intelligent material and robotic systems.

Assistant professor Dr. Forooza Samadi holds her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from The University of Alabama and joined the College as a faculty member in early 2022 after serving as a postdoctoral associate at Virginia Tech. Her main areas of expertise are inverse design and diagnosis. She uses inverse problem solution methods for inverse diagnosis of the unknown function or parameter, which can be a boundary condition, a thermophysical property, or an evolving geometry. She also uses these methods in inverse boundary design, material design and geometry design.

Assistant professor Dr. Krishna Shah earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Arlington and previously worked as a visiting researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. His research is focused on sustainable energy systems, including comprehensive research in electrochemical energy storage systems (Li-ion and Beyond Li-ion Batteries) and thermal-fluid transport in energy systems.

Assistant professor Dr. Majid Vaseghi joined The University of Alabama as a research associate in fall 2021 and became an assistant professor for the department of mechanical engineering in fall 2022. He is broadly interested in understanding process-structure-property-performance relations in engineering materials and performs research in the manufacturing and inverse engineering of metallic components.

Assistant professor Dr. Anahita Zargarani earned her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from The University of Alabama and joined the College as a faculty member in fall 2022. Her research is focused on dynamics of piezoelectrically-actuated microstructures, energy harvesting using smart materials and mechatronic systems.