Fast 15: Kamyar Sardari
by May 13, 2020 8:09 am 970 views
In high school, Iran native Kamyar Sardari wanted to be a volleyball player. By the end of high school, he decided to study engineering. Sardari’s brother was an engineer, he had a close family friend in the field, and he wanted to have an impact on infrastructure.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Tehran in September 2014. Later that year, he moved to Northwest Arkansas to attend graduate school at the University of Arkansas.
He chose the UA after searching internationally for a program in which he could study membrane technology for water and wastewater treatment. He was accepted into three programs: the UA’s, one in Italy and another in Australia. He chose the UA because his adviser, Ranil Wickramasinghe, was well known in the membrane community.
“He offered me a very interesting research project to work on, and he seemed very dedicated,” Sardari said. “So I decided to come here and work with him.”
Sardari was the main investigator for two National Science Foundation projects supported by the Membrane, Science, Engineering and Technology (MAST) Center, overseen by Wickramasinghe, and both projects led to several peer-reviewed publications.
Sardari received a doctorate in chemical engineering from the UA in 2018. He joined Garver as an intern in 2017 and started full time in June 2018.
As a process design engineer, he completes evaluations, studies and designs for water and wastewater plants nationwide, including projects with the Northwest Arkansas Conservation Authority and Dallas Water Utilities. He’s also involved in water reuse projects, which until more recently have been more common in arid climates. But Midwestern states have started to consider projects that treat wastewater into potable water. He’s actively working on five projects and has been involved in more than 10 projects since he started full time at Garver.
He’s one of five on the process team, and over summers he’d served as a mentor for the interns. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, part of his job was attending national conferences and making presentations.
He’s a board member for the MAST Center and performs peer reviews for journals, including the Journal of Water Process Engineering, Separation Science and Technology, and Journal of Membrane Science. He enjoys camping along the Buffalo National River, hiking and playing volleyball.