Technical lead for AVATAR project and Principal Investigator from Imperial College London

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Zahra Sharif Khodaei is a Professor in Aerospace structural durability and health monitoring at the Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London. She is the co-founder of the Structural Integrity and Health Monitoring (SI&HM) group in the department. Her main expertise is in the field of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), both numerical and experimental research in passive (impact detection & classification) and active sensing (damage detection & characterization) of smart structures. She has developed different SHM systems using piezoelectric, fibre optic and novel printed sensors. She has developed SHM technologies and methodologies for diagnosis, prognosis and remaining useful life of composite structures under environmental and operational conditions, within several collaborative projects involving UK industries and academia, EU projects and more recently ESA for space application. Her research also cover health management of structures, by developing real time in service monitoring (load monitoring, strain sensing and shape sensing) of aeronautical structures.

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Her role in AVATAR is the main technical lead, overseeing all technical activities within the project with the main goal of developing a Digital Twin platform for in-service monitoring with IoT sensors.