Mahya joined NSERC PermafrostNet in 2022 as a research associate at the University of Alberta under the supervision of Dr. Duane Froese. The goal of her project is to develop new non-destructive and minimally destructive tools (e.g., industrial Computed Tomography scanning, multi-sensor core logging, time-domain reflectometry) in order to find out the characteristics of permafrost samples from diverse field and laboratory experiments.
She received her Ph.D. in Geotechnical engineering from KN Toosi University of Technology in Iran in 2013 and has 7 years of academic experience as an assistant professor at QIAU as well as research on freeze-thaw cycles and frost heave topics. She has joined the University of Alberta in December 2018 and started working on the frost heave issue at railway tracks. She has successfully led complex projects investigating the effect of freeze-thaw cycles on pure and reinforced/stabilized soils, developing numerical models to investigate the effect of climate change on the thermal regime of the embankment as well as subgrade materials, and published more than 20 journal papers on cold engineering topics.