Research is… exponential growth disguised as suffering.

Dec 3, 2025 – Edmonton, Alberta

Hope Walls with Amir Moghaddam, MSc

I enjoy asking people what their favourite dinosaur is, and why. The answer always comes with a grin.

“The velociraptor—small, overworked, constantly problem-solving, and a bit chaotic. Deeply relatable to grad students everywhere.”

Amir Moghaddam is as intelligent, creative, and driven as he is witty and personable. He shows me a few of his models before we wander off in search of a nice spot to snap a celebratory “you’re done!” photo. We avoid going outside—it’s below zero with a slight windchill—but Amir admits that despite the weather, Edmonton has grown on him. “It has this honest charm: freezing cold winters, ridiculously warm people, and sunsets that look like they’re from another planet.” He also believes Alberta has an engineering spirit baked into it—a place where geology actually matters—and for someone like him, that feels like home.

He successfully completed his MSc exam just last week. All that’s left now are a couple of signatures and returning his office key. In addition to the forthcoming publication of his thesis, “Simulations of Foamy Oil and Geomechanical Behaviour during CO2-based CSI Processes in CHOPS Reservoirs,” he has three papers out for publication and is wrapping up a combined geotech–geomechanics workflow using CO₂-CSI reservoir pressures to understand deformation and wormhole stability. It bridges everything he loves—lab experiments, numerical modelling, stress analysis, and problem-solving with real-world relevance. It’s the closest he’s felt to engineering that lives at the edge of research and application.

He chose [RG]² for its reputation of being technically fearless. “People there don’t avoid hard problems; they run toward them,” he says. He credits the mentorship of Dr. Rick Chalaturnyk, a man he describes as a rare mix of big-picture thinking and deep trust in his students. “I would walk into his office with a mess of an idea and leave believing we might genuinely pull it off.”

During his MSc, Amir built a workflow that went from 3D-printed porous media in the lab to full-scale reservoir and geomechanical modelling. Early on, he spent weeks chasing a pressure mismatch that refused to make sense—rewriting equations, rebuilding sections of the model, questioning every assumption. Then one tiny adjustment made the entire system click. The moment the calibrated model finally behaved after weeks of mischief felt, to him, like winning a small engineering lottery. It proved he could take a problem from concept to field relevance, even when the process seemed impossible.

His biggest lesson? Research grows in silence. Nothing happens for months, then everything finally clicks. “Don’t mistake slow progress for failure,” he says. “You think research is linear until you live it; then you realize it’s exponential growth disguised as suffering.”

To stay balanced, Amir leaned on anything that pulled him completely out of his academic head. Volunteering and TAing helped him pretend he had his life together on days the model refused to cooperate, while sanity breaks came in the form of walking, sarcasm, coffee, long rants to his partner, and the belief that if the centrifuge hadn’t killed him yet, nothing would.

“Engineering is the art of doing for a dollar what any fool can do for two.” —Arthur Mellen Wellington, paraphrased from The Economic Theory of the Location of the Railway, 1877

With “MSc” successfully tacked to the end of his moniker now, Amir is looking forward to being an engineer without the constant background hum of thesis guilt. His work lives at the intersection of subsurface engineering and practical geotechnical design. He wants to build things, solve problems that matter, and keep both sides of his training alive: tackling complex geomechanical questions with grit and integrity while still getting his boots muddy in classic geotech. 

This is exactly where his “dream” job lives—applying advanced numerical modelling to energy-transition challenges like CO₂ storage and heavy-oil recovery, while contributing to classic geotechnical work such as slope stability, foundations, site investigations, and understanding ground behaviour. I guess we will need to check back after he’s been working in his field for a while to see if he still identifies with the velociraptor…

Amir wishes to thank Dr. Rick, his colleagues and friends both in the group and across campus, and the industrial collaborators whose time, knowledge, and resources made completion of his research possible.