Rate My Professor Mehdi Serati

Dr. Mehdi Serati serves as Senior Lecturer, Director of Research, and Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellow in the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland. He completed his PhD in Geotechnical Engineering at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) through the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, focusing on the stiffness and strength of rock cutting and drilling tools such as drag bit and roller disc cutters. Throughout his career at UQ, Serati has held key roles advancing geotechnical engineering research. He is the Deputy Manager of the internationally recognized Large Open Pit (LOP) Project, a collaboration funded by mining companies worldwide, including Large Open Pit IV (2024-2028, Vale SA) and Large Open Pit III (2019-2024, Fortescue Metals Group Limited). This project addresses critical gaps in understanding rock slope failures and landslides in large open pit mines, contributing significantly to the mining industry's safety and stability assessments.

Serati's research expertise lies in designing and setting up advanced equipment and experiments for testing rocks and brittle composites, as well as analytical and experimental methods for geotechnical problems, materials testing, rock mechanics, and rock fracture mechanics. He has secured funding for multiple projects, including Development of Sustainable Shotcrete using Cullet (2022-2025, Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellowship), Catastrophic Rock and Concrete Brittle Failures (2021-2025, ARC Discovery Project), Optimising ore-sand as a scalable circular economy solution (2025-2026, Australia's Economic Accelerator), Field Investigations on the Optimum Design of Pillars at Increasing Stress Environments (2025-2027, Australian Coal Association Research Program), and True triaxial testing of thermally damaged rocks (2020-2021, Griffith University). Notable publications include "On the influence of aggregate alteration on shotcrete fire-induced spalling: A coupled H-TRIS and high-speed photography approach" (2026, Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology), "Mathematical modelling and experimental assessment of fire-induced shotcrete spalling" (2026), "Grain-scale insights into crushed waste glass as a sustainable fine aggregate" (2026, Materials and Structures), "The potential use of crushed waste glass as a sustainable alternative to natural and manufactured sand in geotechnical applications" (2021, Journal of Cleaner Production), "On assessing the tensile cracking pattern in brittle rocks and solids" (2021, Bulletin of Engineering Geology and the Environment), and "Theoretical treatment of disc cutters subjected to general cutting forces" (2016, Journal of Engineering Mathematics). Serati also supervises PhD projects on thermo-mechanical damage behavior of rock, combined dynamic/biaxial compression failure of geostructures, and utilization of waste glass in concrete mixes, furthering sustainable innovations in civil engineering.