
Federico Ciardo, PhD
Tenure-track Assistant Professor & Principal Investigator
I'm a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University. Before joining NU, I completed my postdoctoral research studies in Switzerland and in the USA - first at the Swiss Seismological Service (SED) at ETH Zurich, and then at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. I earned my Ph.D. in Mechanics from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland.
General interests: traveling, skiing, running, playing soccer and footvolley.

Navid Kheirdast, PhD
Post-doc (as of April 1, 2025)
Academic background: I earned a B.Sc. in Civil Engineering from Shahid Beheshti University (PWUT School of Engineering) in Tehran, followed by an M.Sc. in Structural Engineering from the University of Tehran, Faculty of Engineering. I hold a Ph.D. in Seismology from the International Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Seismology (IIEES), Tehran, Iran. Subsequently, I continued my research at the Laboratoire de Géologie of École Normale Supérieure in Paris. My research interests include fully dynamic simulations of the seismic cycle, studying fault instability and fault zone heterogeneity, bridging numerical simulations with inferences from inverse simulations, and incorporating these findings into seismic hazard evaluation.
General interests: Hiking, running, Iranian music, playing setar (Persian traditional stringed instrument), and cooking Iranian recipes.

Aryeh Silver
Graduate student
Academic background: B.A. in Physics from Northwestern University.
General interests: I like to buy and sell second-hand clothing, play guitar, and run.

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