Rate My Professor Zahra Sharif Khodaei

Zahra Sharif Khodaei is Professor of Aerospace Structural Durability and Health Monitoring in the Department of Aeronautics, Faculty of Engineering, at Imperial College London. She earned her PhD in Numerical Modelling of Functionally Graded Materials from Czech Technical University in Prague in 2008. In 2009, she joined Imperial as a Research Associate in the Department of Aeronautics, where she researched fatigue modelling and analysis of metallic and Fibre Metallic Laminates (FML), and developed technologies and methodologies for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of composite structures. Appointed Lecturer in 2014, she progressed to Senior Lecturer and Reader before her promotion to Professor in 2022, marking her as the first female Professor in the Department's 110-year history. She co-founded the Structural Integrity and Health Monitoring Group and serves as Tutor for Women in the Department.

Her research focuses on structural health monitoring (SHM), integrating sensors into composite structures to enable real-time detection of damage, such as impacts, thereby allowing for lighter, more efficient aerospace designs with reduced fuel consumption and improved safety. Key projects include the SHERLOC project, testing SHM on a five-metre curved fuselage panel under complex loading, and an ESA grant for SHM technologies in recertifying reusable vertical launchers. The AVATAR project, where she served as Technical Lead, won awards for sustainability and strategic partnerships. Professor Sharif Khodaei is a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society (FRAeS, 2020) and the Women’s Engineering Society (FWES, 2021). Her highly cited publications include “A convolutional neural network for impact detection and characterization of complex composite structures” (2019), “Assessment of delay-and-sum algorithms for damage detection in aluminium and composite plates” (2014), “Determination of impact location on composite stiffened panels” (2012), “Identification of impact force for smart composite stiffened panels” (2013), and “Aerospace-grade surface mounted optical fibre strain sensor for structural health monitoring on composite structures evaluated against in-flight conditions” (2019). Her work has significantly advanced the field of smart aerospace structures.