Pronouns: he/him/they/them
Citizen of Iran. United States permanent resident.
Assistant Professor (Sept. 2021 - present)
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Cullen College of Engineering
University of Houston
4226 Martin Luther King Boulevard
Houston, TX 77204-4003
Phone: 713-743-4293
Email: bferdowsi@uh.edu
Office: N115 Engineering Building 1
Biography
Behrooz Ferdowsi is an Assistant Professor (Sept. 2021 - present) in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Houston, where he leads a newly established research group on the rheology of Earth materials and physics of Earth’s near-surface processes. He obtained his PhD in Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering from ETH Zurich in Switzerland and his M.Sc. in Civil Engineering from Tehran Polytechnic in Iran. In his PhD research, he worked on understanding the mechanism of triggering of stick-slip instabilities in sheared granular materials using computational methods. For his first postdoctoral appointment, he was based (jointly) in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania and in the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics at the University of Minnesota. During this period, he worked on granular physics of sediment transport in fluvial (rivers and streams) systems and creep in soil and sedimentary materials, and on further understanding the physical basis of the empirical transport laws used for modeling/predicting the evolution of landscapes over geological timescale. This is followed by his second appointment as a Harry H. Hess fellow of the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University, during which he primarily worked on granular rheology and on understanding the physical basis of an empirical constitutive modeling framework for transient rheology of rocks and other geological materials (including glacial till and glacier’s basal shear zone materials, ice-on-ice and ice-on-rock/sediment interfaces, landslide shear zone materials) known as the rate- and state-dependent friction.
For a full and up-to-date CV or other interests in my research, please contact me at: bferdowsi@uh.edu
Membership of professional organizations and societies
. American Geophysical Union (Life member)
. American Physical Society: GPC, DFD, DSOFT, GSNP
. American Association for the Advancement of Science
. American Society of Mechanical Engineers: Applied Mechanics, Tribology
. Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science
. Society of Rheology
. American Association of University Women
. European Geosciences Union
. Geological Society of America
. National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals
Personal facts
Besides science and research in my core research program, I enjoy reading and listening (audiobooks) about the history of science and about the American history. In my free time, I occasionally spend hours looking at and trying to understand some landscape paintings. Some of my favorite contemporary painters and illustrator artists until nowadays are Gerhard_Richter, Richard Mayhew, and Julie Mehretu. Some other personal facts (and opinions):
I am a big fan of almost all things Philadelphia (Philly as the city is informally referred to). I really like the city, its people, culture, museums, and history. I think I have been very fortunate that Philly has been the first place I lived in in the US. The city and its people provided me (a foreigner) a unique experience and perspective toward life and events in the US, from the place I was in, especially in years 2015 to (and including) 2017. I also really liked my time in New Jersey (NJ) as well as in Princeton, NJ.
I used to play two Persian/Iranian traditional musical instruments: setar, which I played rather professionally for nearly eigth years, and tar, which I played for about two years in practicing phase. I no longer play those instruments, partly because I didn’t have access to them (moving from Scotland -> Switzerland -> Canada -> US was a relatively long journey for me, to be thinking about carrying instruments), and partly because I grew to really like Western music. Nowadays, I enjoy listening to operas in classical music, Blues, Alternative/Indie (pop), pop rock, and hip hop, among other various genres. I also very much like to learn playing a brass instrument (probably French Horn, Oboe, or Tuba) sometime soon.
I used to do (I guess the right verb is “draw”, but I am not sure) Persian calligraphy up to my college years. I no longer have time for calligraphy but I still enjoy seeing this unique form of art.