Dr. Navid , an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (), has received a five-year, $550,000 Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation () to support his research to improve modeling of urban environments. The CAREER Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Dr. Goudarzi leads the Multiscale Multiphysics Modeling and Data-Driven Analysis of Thermofluids () Lab and is Co-Director of the Center for Integrated Modeling for Energy, Resiliency, and Sustainability (). His research focuses on multi-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD), reduced-order modeling, and machine learning applied to energy systems, high-performance buildings, urban air mobility, and climate-responsive urban microclimates.

Under this CAREER award, Dr. Goudarzi will conduct research in Thermofluids science to understand how urban morphology influences the dynamic behavior of urban microclimates, including phenomena such as urban heat islands, air stagnation, and extreme wind or thermal events. Moving beyond conventional approaches that overlook unsteady and transient dynamics, his work focuses on interactions among the built environment, wind flow fields, and thermal stratification that collectively govern complex microclimatic behavior. By integrating experimentally validated physics-based simulations with data-driven modeling techniques, his research aims to uncover the underlying physical mechanisms of these interdisciplinary interactions and systematically characterize and quantify them. The goal is to develop scalable tools for real-time simulation and actionable implementation, including Digital Twin platforms with applications in smart cities, advanced mobility, and resilient environmental design.

This award is 91̽»¨â€™s fifth NSF CAREER award since 2018.