Zinedine Khatir

Dr Zinedine Khatir is Associate Professor in Engineering in the Faculty of Computing Engineering and Built Environment. Zinedine is a leading researcher in the fields of Computational Engineering and Science (CES), Computational Fluid dynamics (CFD) and Design Optimisation. CES is a relatively new discipline that deals with the development and application of computational models and simulations, often coupled with High Performance Computing (HPC), to solve complex physical problems arising in engineering analysis and design as well as natural phenomena. CES has been described as the "third mode of discovery" (next to theory and experimentation). He has published around 80 refereed journal papers, book chapters, conference papers and technical and industrial reports, supervised PhDs and taught postgraduate and undergraduate courses.

Zinedine began his career on final-year projects in his degrees from the University of Franche-Comté, Besançon, France (UFCB), and continued a Master undertaken at the University of Idaho, USA and subsequently got his Master of Philosophy in Engineering Mathematics and Scientific Computation from UFCB. After a small period lecturing and doing research in higher education in France and in the UK, he then obtained his PhD in CFD from the University of Warwick, UK, where he developed high-tech computer modelling techniques for the numerical study of turbulence and flow control. Zinedine has a mixed career in academia and industry. He has been awarded the prestigious Marie Curie Fellowship funded by the European Union in 2003 and 2005 which he held at the Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal (i.e. Ox-Bridge Portuguese equivalent) and Queen’s University Belfast, UK respectively. Before joining BCU in February 2020, he had been working at the University of Leeds, UK, for more than 10 years with an interim year at Curtin University Malaysia where he lead the Computational Engineering Science Research Group dedicated to multidisciplinary applied research. He still holds a visiting research position within the School of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Leeds.

While this still remains an important part of his work, since his move to Birmingham City University, his interests have further expanded into new areas of research, including machine learning for medical and biological systems and energy efficient computing, alongside the more usual engineering systems encompassing mechanical, nuclear and thermal airflow using Open Source computational-based approaches (i.e. OpenFOAM, Scilab, etc.) and multi-disciplinary design optimisation aspects of his work.

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