Dr. Manoochehr Shirzaei's research is focused on space-borne synthetic aperture radar technology, groundwater resources management, green energies, and equitable adaptation to natural and anthropogenic land subsidence, sea level rise, and coastal hazards in the face of changing climate.
Dr. Manoochehr Shirzaei develops transformative and transdisciplinary solutions to tackle the grand challenges posed by land subsidence. His research is focused on space-borne synthetic aperture radar technology, groundwater resources management, green energies, and equitable adaptation to natural and anthropogenic land subsidence, sea level rise, and coastal hazards in the face of changing climate.
As the Land Subsidence Analytics Lead at UNU-INWEH, he is leading a new transdisciplinary research initiative at the intersection of climate change, infrastructure resilience, environmental security, and societal risk. His work as UNU-INWEH focuses on emerging issues that relate to detecting land subsidence, developing engineering and nature-based adaptation and mitigation strategies, and evaluating communities and infrastructure systems risk under extreme events and compound hazard.
Dr. Shirzaei is an associate professor of Radar Remote Sensing Engineering and Environmental Security at the Department of Geosciences and National Security Institute of Virginia Tech. He has authored over 250 peer-reviewed articles, technical reports, extended abstracts, and abstracts and has supervised over 60 postdocs, Ph.D., MS, and undergraduate students. He has received several awards from the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. National Science Foundation, and Virginia Tech (the Virginia Tech Research Excellence and Innovation Award).
Dr. Shirzaei has been a member of the NASA Sea Level Change Science Team and NASA GRACE Satellite Science Team. He serves on the Southern California Earthquake Center Geodesy Committee and the U.S. Geological Survey’s Coastal Flood Modeling team. He is also the U.S. representative at the UNESCO Land Subsidence International Initiative.