Mahmoud is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering specializing in natural disasters and infrastructure resilience, with a notable focus on wildfire prediction and community-level damage assessment.

Mahmoud’s work delves into the spatial and temporal aspects of resilience and sustainability trade-offs in communities facing natural disasters. He assesses and develops resilient structural systems for various hazards like floods, tornadoes, earthquakes and wildfires. Mahmoud also investigates infrastructure deterioration, failure and management, with a particular interest in bridge behavior.

With a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, his research is widely recognized, including publications in prestigious journals such as Nature Computational Science and Nature Communications.