MIE’s Yahya Modarres-Sadeghi Becomes ASME Fellow and an Associate Dean in the CoE

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Yahya Modarres-Sadeghi, a professor in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department, has been selected for two prominent positions, one national and the other within the UMass Amherst College of Engineering (CoE). In the first instance, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has elected him as an ASME Fellow, the organization’s highest elected grade of membership, which is conferred upon ASME members with significant publications or innovations and a distinguished scientific and engineering background. Secondly, the CoE has chosen Modarres-Sadeghi as its new Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Operations.

Founded in 1880, ASME is a not-for-profit professional organization that enables collaboration, knowledge sharing, and skill development across all engineering disciplines, while promoting the vital role of the engineer in society. Fellowship is the highest elected grade of membership within ASME, the attainment of which recognizes outstanding engineering achievements and contributions to the engineering profession. To become an ASME Fellow, an ASME member must have 10 or more years of active practice.

In the CoE, Modarres-Sadeghi is transitioning to the post of the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Operations this summer, and he will take over a host of responsibilities. The Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Operations provides leadership and oversight for promotion and tenure, faculty development and mentoring, strategic planning, college-level facilities and space planning, IT for the college, and flexible/hybrid learning programs. The Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Operations is also a member of the Senior Leadership Team of the CoE.

Modarres-Sadeghi is an international leader in the understanding of fluid-structure interactions using experimental, theoretical, and numerical techniques, with applications in diverse fields.

Accordingly, Modarres-Sadeghi is the director the MIE Fluid-Structure Interactions (FSI) Lab. As he explains, “At the FSI Lab, we use experimental, theoretical, and numerical tools to understand different fluid-structure-interaction phenomena, both from a fundamental point of view and with applications in several fields, including wind energy and biomedical science.”

In 2022-2023 Modarres-Sadeghi was a Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He was one of only 50 practitioners to receive this highly prestigious fellowship, with which he collaborated on the design of robotic fish to enable the study of behaviors in extreme ocean environments. 

Modarres-Sadeghi has also served as an associate editor at the Journal of Fluids and Structures since 2016. This refereed journal, with a cite score of 6.9 and an impact factor of 3.4,  publishes original papers on all aspects of the interaction between fluids and solids.

Modarres-Sadeghi joined the UMass MIE department in 2009, shortly after spending three years as a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before that, he earned his B.S. and M.S. at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, and his Ph.D. from McGill University in Montreal. (July 2024)