Dr. Farokhnia received his PhD degree in Civil Engineering from University of Colorado Boulder in 2013 and his dissertation focused on performance based earthquake engineering and rapid regional level seismic risk assessment. He has conducted two postdoctoral research work at Virginia Tech and at the Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning at Colorado State University. His work is focused on applying the science of Artificial Intelligence in resilience-based planning for infrastructural network, and regional level natural hazards risk assessment.
Dr. Farokhnia is also the founder of a research-based startup company NHRC, LLC (Natural Hazards Research and Consulting Center). His work at NHRC is dedicated to study indirect early consequences or precursors of earthquake occurrence, such as disruption in the earth electromagnetic field, gravity field, early rock fracture infrasound detection, groundwater flow and pore water pressure variation, radon gas emission, displacement field, heat gradient, and air ions emissions. This is a comprehensive study on all the already developed prediction models of earthquake induced precursors, and to develop a collective algorithm utilizing all of them interactively to avoid single precursor model noises or malfunction.