Maryam Shakiba joins SEM faculty

Maryam Shakiba joins Virginia Tech from her position as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she developed a mechanistic approach to calculate environmental effects of pavements structure and incorporated it into Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) analysis. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, Iran. She earned her Ph.D. from Texas A&M University where her dissertation was focused on multi-physics modeling of thermo-hydro-mechanical damage mechanisms of porous viscous composite media at different scales. She uses theoretical and computational mechanics to unravel the link between the composition, microstructure, and performance of composites under different environmental and mechanical loading. This integration of computational techniques and material sciences provides the structural mechanics a tool to design new resilient, sustainable, and multifunctional materials and structures. This will lead to address societal challenges such as meeting energy demands and manufacturing innovative design. She is co-author on 9 published journal papers.