Professor Mohammadian appointed CME department head

Professor Mohammadian

Professor Abolfozl “Kouros” Mohammadian has been appointed the new Head of UIC’s Department of Civil and Materials Engineering. His appointment started on Jan. 1, 2017. As the department head, Mohammadian will lead a department of 25 faculty members, eight full-time staff members, and continuously growing student body.

Mohammadian started his career in CME in 2002 as an assistant professor. He was named an associate professor in 2008, and was promoted to a professor in 2013. As a faculty member, he served as the department’s Director of Graduate Studies, and the associate director of the Center for Supply Chain Management and Logistics.

During his tenure at UIC, the prolific professor has won numerous teaching, research, and advising awards from the university and professional organizations. He is a member of multiple scientific and professional societies, including the chairman of the National Academies’ Transportation Research Board (TRB) Committee on Travel Behavior and Values. He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Transportation Letters and has authored/co-authored more than 280 scholarly publications in a wide-variety of journals, conference proceedings, and books. His total research funding exceeds $10 million, with more than $4 million of direct intellectual credit share. He is the director of the department’s TransLab, where his research experience and interests are focused primarily on transportation planning and travel behavior analysis, goods movement and logistics, and applied econometrics.

“This is a very exciting time for the civil and materials engineering department, and a great opportunity to build upon Professor Rockne’s work,” said Mohammadian. “I know there’s a lot of work to be done, but that has never stopped me before.”

Mohammadian’s predecessor Professor Karl Rockne, who is the director of the Eco-hydrology and Environmental Biotechnology Laboratory, successfully led the department for nearly three years. During his tenure the department added several new faculty members and student enrollment was dramatically increased.

“We also need to express our deep and heartfelt thanks to Professor Karl Rockne for his strong and untiring leadership as interim head,” said Dean Pete Nelson, of the College of Engineering. “The department has made some remarkable progress over the last years while Karl has led the CME Department.”

Learn more about CME’s new department head at Mohammadian Profile.