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Pouria Ghods named recipient of the Morris Cohen Student Award

Pouria Ghods has been named the recipient of the Corrosion Division’s 2010 Morris Cohen Graduate Student Award. He received his BSc degree in 2001 and his MSc degree in 2004, both in civil engineering from University of Tehran, Iran. He joined the PhD program at Carleton University and conducted research on corrosion of infrastructure with O. Burkan Isgor as his advisor. He completed part of his experimental work at CANMET Materials Technology Laboratories (MTL) in Canada. He obtained his doctorate degree in civil engineering materials in June 2010. The main goal of Dr. Ghods’ PhD study was to carry out multi-scale investigations of the formation and chlorideinduced breakdown of passive films on steel in the highly alkaline environment of concrete. The multi-scale investigation was designed to bridge length scales from the nanoscale to the macroscopic. In addition to traditional electrochemical methods such as electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), he used highly specialized experimental techniques, such as transmission electron microscopy (TEM) of the samples taken using focused ion beam (FIB) technique and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) as well as atomic force microscopy (AFM) to characterize the passive film properties both in the absence and presence of chloride. Dr. Ghods has forty peer-review publications including thirteen journal articles. He received several awards including the NACE Foundation Academic Award in 2009, an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2010, and the Jag Mohan Humar Graduate Student Fellowship in 2007. His research interests are numerical modeling of steel corrosion in concrete, microscopic studies of passivity and pitting corrosion, non-destructive corrosion measurement of rebars in concrete structures, and evaluation of coatings performance in aggressive environments. He may be reached at pghods@connect.carleton.ca.