Najmedin Meshkati
Professor at the Department of Civil/Environmental Engineering and at the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California (USC).
His research is concerned primarily with the risk reduction and reliability enhancement of complex and large-scale technological systems, which include such systems as energy generation, esp. nuclear power plants, the five modes of transportation and their facilities, petrochemical plants and refineries, transmission and distribution grids, and telecommunication networks. He has conducted research on and inspected many nuclear power and petrochemical plants around the world including Chernobyl in May 1997. Prof. Meshkati is a Jefferson Science Fellow and a Senior Science and Engineering Advisor, with the Office of the Science and Technology Adviser to the Secretary of State (2009-2010). He is an elected Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), an AT&T Faculty Fellow in Industrial Ecology, a twice NASA Faculty Fellow at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. He simultaneously received a B.S. in Industrial Engineering and a B.A. in Political Science in 1976, from Sharif (Arya-Meher) University of Technology and Shahid Beheshti University (National University of Iran), respectively; a M.S. in Engineering Management in 1978; and a Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering in 1983 from USC.