09/01/2022
By Edwin L. Aguirre
Mahsa Ghandi has always been deeply interested in addressing environmental concerns, whether it is about protecting water resources or designing climate-resilient homes. As a result, Ghandi decided to become an engineer, with a focus on numerical modeling, to enable her to tackle environmental issues and help improve the lives of people everywhere.
In her native country of Iran, Ghandi earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in water resources engineering from the University of Tehran in 2015 and 2018, respectively. Last year, she came to UMass Lowell to pursue a doctorate in industrial engineering.
“UML has an excellent reputation in the world for its faculty and the quality of its education and research,” she says. “This is a very important consideration for me, since after finishing my Ph.D., I would like to be well-qualified for a postdoctoral position, or to apply for a research lab or industry position.”
Last fall, Ghandi joined Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Asst. Prof. Jasmina Burek's lab to help develop an environmental and cost-assessment decision support tool to simplify the process of designing sustainable, resilient commercial and residential construction and to make building them more affordable.
“Our goal is to help architects design cost-effective, resilient and environmentally friendly homes and buildings,” she says.
According to Ghandi, resilient buildings offer protection from natural hazards like hurricanes, floods and earthquakes, but their widespread implementation is hindered by the high cost of building materials and energy for heating and cooling, as well as environmental impacts.
“By identifying low-impact, low-cost construction materials and designs, an integrated, multi-criteria optimization system would enable architects to design buildings that reduce not only economic risks but also greenhouse gas emissions through the use of sustainable materials and renewable energy sources,” she says.
Ghandi’s previous work in Iran helped lay down the foundation for her academic pursuits and social advocacy.
While an undergraduate student in Tehran, she helped build a scale model of the Shushtar Historical Hydraulic System that was exhibited in a science museum. Shushtar, one of the country’s engineering masterpieces, was built in the fifth century B.C. and has been designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Ghandi also participated for two years in UNESCO’s World Science Day for Peace and Development, and in her senior year, she led a research team to calculate groundwater balance in a village outside Tehran using GIS mapping and analysis software. (Groundwater balance refers to the inflow and outflow as well as changes in storage of water in a groundwater system over a defined period of time.)
Ghandi’s master’s thesis focused on crisis management and risk analysis of urban water supply. As part of her research, she calculated rainfall surface runoff flow, exported long-term daily data for risk assessment of water resources and agricultural systems with a weather simulation model, and implemented a project using geospatial software to optimize the parameters used for assessing the sensitivity and vulnerability of aquifers to contamination.
After obtaining her master’s degree, Ghandi worked for a year as a research and development specialist at the Regional Centre on Urban Water Management in Tehran, under the auspices of UNESCO.
“That experience was valuable in the context of team building and teamwork, and learning from people’s different viewpoints in all aspects of research,” she says.
Now, as a UML graduate student, Ghandi considers her time at the university to be an experience of a lifetime.
“UMass Lowell is world-renowned for its inspiring academic environment, eminent scholars and diverse student communities,” she says. “It will help me broaden my world-view and sharpen my skills in conducting advanced research.”