Academic Credentials
  • Ph.D., Materials Engineering, University of Illinois, Chicago, 2019
  • B.S., Materials and Metallurgical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, 2014
Academic Appointments
  • Instructor of Materials Engineering Course, Loyola University Chicago, Spring 2019
Professional Honors
  • Chancellor’s Student Service and Leadership Award (CSSLA)
Languages
  • Persian (Farsi)

Dr. Tehrani specializes in materials science and physical and mechanical metallurgy of various alloys with specific expertise in high strength aluminum alloy development for automotive structural parts. She is experienced in failure and root cause analysis, creep damage and welding characterization, as well as ultrasonic non-destructive testing. 

Dr. Tehrani has worked with manufacturing plants across the globe for casting, rolling, and processing of aluminum alloys followed by design and execution of experiments to investigate their chemical and mechanical properties, corrosion and crash resistance, and joining/bonding of components.

Prior to joining Exponent, Dr. Tehrani worked as a Senior Metallurgy Engineer at the Novelis Global Research and Technology Center, where she served as a project manager and technical lead on multiple projects related to next-generation aluminum alloys for the automotive market. Her areas of focus were lab capability development for advance coupon-level crash testing methods for automotive structural components, surface quality improvement, and fundamental metallurgical investigation on processing-microstructure-property relationship of high strength alloys for improving formability.

Dr. Tehrani is well-versed in a range of characterization techniques including optical microscopy (OM), scanning and transmission electron microscopy (SEM and TEM), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), X-ray diffraction (XRD), focused ion beam milling (FIB), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), as well as non-destructive evaluation techniques such as linear and nonlinear ultrasonic testing (UT).

She completed her Ph.D. in Materials Engineering at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where she focused on early creep damage detection in 410 stainless steel using nonlinear ultrasonics. Her investigations led to improvements in sensitivity of nonlinear UT to minute metallurgical variation in the microstructure that are not detectable by linear UT, which can prevent catastrophic failures in parts subjected to both high temperature and mechanical loading.

Dr. Tehrani is an advocate for STEM and women in engineering and has served as President of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at UIC.