short biography

Dr. Saffarini finished high school in 2008 with an overall score of 98.7%. He was ranked 3rd over his school, 5th over the city, and the 13th over UAE among 35,000 students. For that, he was awarded UAE's Ministry of Presidential Affairs Scholarship to pursue his undergraduate studies.

In August 2008, he joined the American University of Sharjah (AUS), a top university in U.A.E. and middle east, to pursue a civil engineering degree. Over the span of 4.5 years, Dr. Saffarini managed to take multidisciplinary courses that cover the areas of Mechanics of Materials, Structural Engineering, Geotechnical Engineering, and Water Engineering. For his graduation project, he worked on developing a graphical user interface (GUI) that design and analyze concrete dams under the supervision of Dr. Kutsi Erduran. The project was awarded the departmental best senior design project award. 

In February 2013, Dr. Saffarini started pursuing his master's degree in civil engineering at the same university under the supervision of Dr. Farid Abed. Dr. Abed is a distinguished professor at the American University of Sharjah and is a well-known scientist in the field of Mechanics of Materials. Concurrently, Dr. Saffarini joined a leading consulting firm where he worked as a Junior Structural Engineer at Eng. Adnan Saffarini Office. In February 2014, he left consultancy to join a worldwide leading Onshore and Offshore EPCI firm in the Oil & Gas industry. He worked as an Offshore Methods Engineer at Saipem. For three years (2013 - 2016), Dr. Saffarini was able to concurrently excel in both of his jobs and in his academic career. In academia, Dr. Saffarini graduated with a master's degree in civil engineering with GPA of 3.95 out of 4.0, in addition to publishing 1 peer reviewed paper, 1 peer reviewed conference paper, and 1 thesis. In industry, he was leading multi-million-dollar projects and got promoted three times.

In August 2017, Dr. Saffarini left his job at Saipem to join the Computational Solid Mechanics (CSM) lab to pursue his PhD at Louisiana State University (LSU) and work under the supervision of Dr. George Voyiadjis. Dr. Voyiadjis is one of the leading scientists in the field of computational solid mechanics, plasticity, and damage mechanics. Over the span of 4 years, Dr. Saffarini was able to take 11 courses, submit and publish 4 peer reviewed papers, a thesis and a dissertation. For that, in August 2021, he was awarded a master's degree in Materials Science and Engineering, and a PhD in Civil Engineering, Engineering Mechanics of Materials. He graduated with a GPA of 4.125 out of 4.0 as he was able to achieve A+ (LSU bonus system) in several courses. Upon graduating in August 2021, Dr. Saffarini worked as an adjunct instructor for one semester (Fall 2021) at LSU teaching mechanics of materials lab at the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

In January 2022, after completing his PhD, Dr. Saffarini started his postdoctoral fellowship at University of Missouri (MU) working with Dr. Zhen Chen and Dr. Tommy Sewell as part of the MU Materials Science and Engineering Institute (MSEI) efforts. The fellowship focused on performing multiscale comparative simulations to improve the design of shock-resistant nano-cellular solids. The fellowship lasted for one year after which Dr. Saffarini started another fellowship at the Center for Explosion Resistant Design (CERD) at MU. Dr. Saffarini joined the CERD team to lead the efforts for multiscale modeling and simulation of blast-resistant curtain wall systems as part of 3,000,000 USD grant from the US Army ERDC.

In March 2024, Dr. Saffarini joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), one of the top science labs around the world and the host for the fastest HPC known to date. Dr. Saffarini work is focused at ORNL on developing numerical codes that can be used to solve important and essential engineering problems. As part of the Multiscale Materials group at the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division, Dr. Saffarini contributes to the advancement of the group and performing cutting-edge research.

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