Rate My Professor Shahin Rahimifard

Professor Shahin Rahimifard is Professor of Sustainable Engineering in the School of Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering at Loughborough University, a position held since April 2009. He is the Founder and Director of the Centre for Sustainable Manufacturing and Recycling Technologies (SMART), established in 2004, and Deputy Director of the UK National Centre for Innovative Food Manufacturing, leading research on resource-efficient localised food production, food waste valorisation, and food supply chain resilience. Rahimifard earned a BSc in Computing and Mathematics from the University of Brighton, an MSc in Computer Integrated Manufacture, and a PhD in Operational Planning of Manufacturing Systems from Loughborough University in 1996. He is a Chartered Engineer (CEng), Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (FIMechE), and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). With over twenty years as an Industrial Engineer in R&D projects, he has worked with companies such as Rolls-Royce, Jaguar Land Rover, General Motors, Nike, Unilever, PepsiCo, Marks & Spencer, and Tesco on supply chain management, production planning, and environmental management systems.

His research specializations centre on sustainability in Life Cycle Engineering, including sustainable product design, low carbon manufacturing, sustainable business and consumption models, product service systems, end-of-life management, recovery, reuse, and recycling technologies, automation in remanufacturing, and waste management in the food sector. Rahimifard serves as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering since 2007 and is a member of committees such as the IFAC Technical Committee on Enterprise Integration and Networking since 2001, and organising committees for conferences including CIRP Manufacturing Systems, International Conference on Manufacturing Research, and Value Chain Sustainability. He has delivered keynote speeches at events like the International Conference on Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing in 2008 and the IMS Manufacturing Technology Platform Workshop in 2008. Key publications include Zocco et al. (2025) 'Synchronized Object Detection for Autonomous Sorting, Mapping, and Quantification of Materials in Circular Healthcare'; Mardina et al. (2025) 'CM3D: A circular materials Multi-Criteria Decision-Making tool for medical devices'; Zocco et al. (2025) 'Towards a Thermodynamical Deep-Learning-Vision-Based Flexible Robotic Cell for Circular Healthcare'; Pu et al. (2024) 'Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Job Shop Scheduling in Dynamic Environments'; and Simaei and Rahimifard (2024) 'AI-based decision support system for enhancing end-of-life value recovery from e-wastes'.