Rate My Professor Reza Alam

M. Reza Alam is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the American Bureau of Shipping Chair in Ocean Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, within the Engineering faculty. He currently serves as Vice Chair for Equity and Inclusion in the department. Born in Yazd, Iran, Alam earned his BSc in Mechanical Engineering in 2001 and MSc in Applied Mechanics in 2003 from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. He continued his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving an MSc in Mechanical Engineering in 2005 under George Haller and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 2008 under Dick Yue and Yuming Liu. After his PhD, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT from 2008 to 2009 and Lecturer from 2009 to 2011. In July 2011, Alam joined UC Berkeley as Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, promoted to Associate Professor in 2017, and later to Professor.

Alam's research focuses on theoretical fluid dynamics, nonlinear wave mechanics, ocean and coastal waves phenomena, ocean renewable energy encompassing wave, tide, and offshore wind energy, nonlinear dynamical systems, and fluid flow control. He leads the Theoretical and Applied Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (TAFLab), developing technologies like the Wave Carpet for ocean wave energy harvesting and exploring wave cloaking and machine learning applications in wave prediction. Key publications include Broadband Cloaking in Stratified Seas (Physical Review Letters, 2012), Microswimmer-Induced Chaotic Mixing (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2015), and Rapid Phase-Resolved Prediction of Nonlinear Dispersive Waves Using Machine Learning (arXiv, recent). With over 2,600 citations on Google Scholar, his work impacts marine renewable energy and fluid dynamics fields. Alam has held the American Bureau of Shipping Endowed Chair in Ocean Engineering since 2017. His team was among finalists for the Odebrecht Award for Sustainable Development.