Congratulations to Iman Ebrahimi on being awarded the 2026 Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship in Mechanical Engineering. This competitive fellowship recognizes an outstanding doctoral candidate in their final term of study and supports their transition into research and teaching careers.
At the University of California, Merced, Ebrahimi works in Professor Ricardo de Castro’s lab on battery management systems and develop novel, safety-critical, and computationally efficient control algorithms for advanced battery systems. His research mainly focuses on developing safe and real-time optimal control methods for fast charging, fast discharge during emergency conditions, battery balancing, and thermal management for electrified transportation systems.
Ebrahimi's PhD work brings these projects together through a common control framework based on Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), with applications ranging from reconfigurable and multi-chemistry battery packs to fast charging and thermal runaway prevention. Moving forward, Ebrahimi is interested in continuing work on advanced battery software and intelligent control architectures for safer and higher-performance energy storage systems.
