Meet our faculty, Professor Mehdi Pouragha

Consider a grain of sand– the symbol of simplicity. And yet, if we put enough of these small grains together, we get a material (sand) with such rich behaviour that can be rigid like a solid, flow like a liquid or even fly around like a gas!

In my research, I try to understand the behaviour of soils by looking at their simple microscopic constituents. This quickly gets very interesting; The same path that takes us from a single grain to understanding the complexities of a pile of sand is very similar to those for explaining other complex systems in terms of their constituents: how the flow of traffic can be understood in terms of individual cars, the economic trends in terms of individual economic entities, or a social response in terms of individual reactions. The physical and mathematical questions we face in these seemingly remote disciplines suddenly become extremely similar. These non-trivial commonalities across disciplines always fascinate me.

My research explores such a multiscale approach to soils, particularly when they are subjected to climate change effects. I try to address questions like, “What happens to the frozen arctic soils when the ice bonds binding the soil particles together melt as a result of higher temperatures? How would the soil in the Northern regions react to the increased rainfall records? And ultimately, what are our options to predict, contain, and even remedy the geotechnical calamities of climate change?”

I received my BSc and MSc from the Sharif University of Technology (Iran), and my Ph.D. from the University of Calgary.

Outside academia, I am an amateur musician. I play the Oud (middle-eastern lute) and sometimes compose music.