PhD defense & SNSF Post-doctoral Fellowship for Mahmoud Shaqfa
© 2022 EESD EPFL
Mahmoud Shaqfa has defended successfully his PhD thesis at EESD, ENAC. His next step will be as a postdoc at MIT under the SNSF Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme.
Mahmoud Shaqfa has defended successfully his PhD thesis "Geometrical Treatise on the Modelling of 3D Particulate Inclusion-Matrix Microstructures with an Application to Historical Stone Masonry Walls". The members of the jury were Prof. Mathew DeJong (UC Berkeley, external examiner), Prof. Daniel V Oliveira (the University of Minho, external examiner), Prof. William Curtain (EPFL, internal examiner) and Prof. Alain Nussbaumer (EPFL, the jury president).
Mahmoud's thesis provided comprehensive treatment for the generation of 3D microstructures of historical stone masonry walls. This enables the generation of common stone masonry typologies that will be used later for numerical simulations (i.e, finite element method). Then, Mahmoud focused on studying the roughness and topology of open surfaces. He proposed to use the spherical cap harmonics (SCH) and disk harmonics (DH) approaches to study the expansion of self-affine surfaces. These approaches allow for a multiscale analysis methodology that helps in constructing the power spectral density (PSD), across several decades, of nominally flat and curved surfaces. Finally, Mahmoud focused on accelerating the harmonic expansions of surfaces, open and closed ones, by exploiting the symmetry and sparsity of these basis functions.
Recently, Mahmoud also won the SNSF post-doctoral fellowship where he will join the group of Prof. Wim van Rees at MIT. Mahmoud will work on extending the harmonic decomposition methods that he developed at EESD for more general typologies and will employ them to simulate the growth of soft shells.
Mahmoud's publications can be accessed online on this infoscience link.