Biography
I was born in Tehran, Iran in September of 1949. I attended Alborz High School in Tehran and graduated in 1968 and left for the United States on student visa to study engineering at University of California, Davis (UCD) at suggestion of my father who was doing research at UCD veterinary school in the early 1950s. I graduated from UCD with BSc in the field of Mechanical Engineering. After graduation, I worked on design of industrial air-conditioning in a small company in Mountain View, California. After 7 months, I started my graduate studies in Mechanical Engineering at San Jose State University and wrote my MSc thesis on modelling of fire protective systems exposed to large-scale hydrocarbon fires and graduated in 1975. Upon graduation, under a NASA-San Jose State University Consortium, I was offered a research position in NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, to further continue my research on fire protective systems, subject to large-scale turbulent flames. After three years of research, I decided to leave NASA to continue further graduate studies in the field of combustion. In 1978, I started graduate studies at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) La Jolla, working under supervision of Prof. Forman A. Williams in the field of combustion. My research involved three areas of combustion science―namely radiation in flames, polymer combustion, and flame inhibition, leading to a Ph.D. in Engineering Physics in 1981. Upon graduation from UCSD in 1981, I joined Northwestern University in November 1981 as a postdoctoral fellow to work with Prof. C. K. Law in the Mechanical Engineering Department. In 1983, I was promoted to Visiting Assistant Professor. In 1984, I became Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and was promoted to Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering in 1990. I supervised five doctoral students: T. H. Lin, W. J. Sheu, C. L. Chen, H. G. Pearlman, and H. Lee.
s-sohrab@northwestern.edu