Ali is a technical team lead in ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company. Before joining URC, Ali was a postdoctoral fellow in the Computational Hydraulics Group and Applied Mathematics Group in the Institute for Computational Sciences and Engineering in The University of Texas at Austin. He holds a BSc, MSc, and PhD in civil engineering from the Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic) in Iran. His doctoral advisor in AUT was Prof. Vahid Lotfi. His dissertation was on developing a high-order absorbing boundary condition for the numerical simulation of dam-water-foundation system. The main application of this research is in modeling dams under earthquake load in the time domain. One of the main issues in such applications is the unboundedness of reservoir's water and foundation rock. Although one can use approximate boundary conditions to tackle this problem, the search for a robust and efficient boundary condition that can be applied on the truncation boundary to simulate these semi-infinite media has been an active research topic.
During his PhD studies, Ali was working as a dam design expert in Mahab Ghodss Consulting Engineering Co.. He was involved with a number of major projects including first and second phase studies of Chamshir Dam (height: 150 m), Khersan 2 Dam (height: 240 m), and Bakhtiari Dam (height: 270 m).
After completing his PhD in Iran, Ali was admitted to UT Austin's Department of Aerospace Engieering and Engineering Mechanics for his second PhD in 2013 (since the first PhD was not enough of a punishment !). In Feb. 2017, he completed his PhD in Computational Mechanics supervised by Prof. Clint Dawson. In this period, Ali's research was mainly focused on the application of finite element method in different problems in fluid mechanics, and coastal ocean modeling. He worked on a Hybridized discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) method for KdV equation. He has also applied an explicit HDG to the Nonlinear Shallow Water Equation (NSWE), and irrotational Serre-Green-Naghdi equation.
Afterwards, Ali worked with Prof. Irene Gamba on numerical modeling of the coupled drift-diffusion equations in Photoelectrochemical (PEC) cells.