Idaho State University faculty member Mustafa Mashal has been named the CAES associate director for ISU. Mashal replaces Dave Rodgers, who retired in December after more than three years in the role.
Mashal is an associate professor and director of the Disaster Response Complex and Structural Laboratories in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at ISU. He is also a CAES fellow and frequent collaborator with researchers from Idaho National Laboratory.
He is currently a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in the Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering at Qatar University in Doha, Qatar. Mashal will begin his CAES leadership responsibilities immediately, and will work remotely until August.
Mashal obtained his doctorate, master’s and bachelor’s in Civil Engineering with a focus on Structural and Earthquake Engineering from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, the State University of New York at Buffalo in the United States, and Kabul University in Afghanistan, respectively. He has more than 12 years of consulting and academic experience in the United States, New Zealand and Afghanistan and has been the recipient of several awards and recognitions such as the 2020 Alfred Noble Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the 2018 ASCE Southern Idaho Section Outstanding Civil Engineer of the Year Award, and University of Canterbury’s Visiting Erskine Fellowship.
Mashal was a member of the 2021 cohort of the CAES Summer Visiting Faculty Program. He has collaborated often with INL researchers on projects such as the Disaster Response Complex, an outdoor site that accommodates research, curriculum development and training/exercises for emergency responders from across the region, and a current project studying the use of robots for nuclear power plant security applications that received CAES Collaboration Funds and an ISU-CAES seed grant in 2022.
He joins associate directors Dave Estrada from Boise State University and John Russell from University of Idaho and CAES Director Philip Reppert on the CAES Executive Board.
