Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies
Email: zsiddique@ou.edu
Phone: (405) 325-4397
Office: Carson Engineering Center, 107
Education
Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering (2000)
Georgia Institute of Technology
M.S., Mechanical Engineering (1996)
Georgia Institute of Technology
B.S., Mechanical Engineering (1994)
Georgia Institute of Technology
Zahed Siddique is Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Studies and Facilities in the Gallogly College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma and the Dick and Shirley O'Shields Professor in Mechanical Engineering. Since 2021 he has led the college's research strategy, during which annual research expenditures grew from approximately $23 million to $54 million and new awards reached a record $95 million. He conceived the Sooner Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory, now a nationally recognized center for metal additive manufacturing and U.S. Air Force sustainment, and serves as lead principal investigator on $17.5 million in Air Force Research Laboratory awards. His research spans additive manufacturing qualification, materials characterization for hydrogen and extreme environments, machine learning for manufacturing quality, and engineering design cognition. He has graduated 13 doctoral students and published more than 200 papers.
Research Focus
Dr. Siddique's research lab: Product and Process Design Lab
Honors and Awards
BIOGRAPHY
Zahed Siddique has spent twenty-six years at the University of Oklahoma building research capacity at successively larger scales — first a capstone program, then a school, and now a college.
As Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Studies and Facilities in the Gallogly College of Engineering, he leads research strategy for Oklahoma's largest engineering college. Since 2021, annual research expenditures have grown from approximately $23 million to $54 million, new awards reached a record $95 million in FY26, and the college supports more than 300 active research projects across 15 research clusters. The growth belongs to the faculty who earned it; Siddique's contribution is the structure around it — a cluster-based research framework, a college-wide graduate pipeline, a faculty onboarding and success program serving more than 90 faculty, and a long-range facilities plan that includes an $80 million flagship research building.
He helped conceive the Sooner Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory (SAML), developing its vision and strategic plan before any external funding existed and leading it from concept to a nationally recognized center for metal additive manufacturing and U.S. Air Force sustainment. As lead principal investigator, Siddique and his team have secured $17.5 million in Air Force Research Laboratory awards across Phase I and Phase II, the latter in partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with total sponsored research exceeding $18 million since 2022. SAML's work spans laser powder bed fusion qualification, AI- and machine-learning-enabled process monitoring, digital twins, and reverse engineering for legacy aircraft components — a systematic pathway from production to airworthiness certification. He is also a co-founder of the OU Bioprocessing Core Facility, serving as co-principal investigator on OU's $7 million Economic Development Administration award within the $35 million Build Back Better Regional Challenge coalition that established nine biomanufacturing laboratories in the Oklahoma City Innovation District.
Siddique's own research spans additive manufacturing and defense sustainment, materials characterization for extreme environments including hydrogen infrastructure, machine learning for quality and defect analysis, and the cognitive science of engineering creativity. He has published more than 60 journal articles and 140 conference papers, edited two volumes on product family and platform design, and holds more than $30 million in external funding as principal or co-principal investigator.
Before moving to college-level leadership, Siddique served as Director of the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering from 2017 to 2020, where proposal volume grew 2.4-fold in three years and the faculty expanded by nearly a third. From 2009 to 2017 he coordinated the mechanical engineering senior capstone program, raising $100,000 to $200,000 annually from industry partners and building a program recognized in a National Academy of Engineering report. He advised OU's Formula SAE team, the Sooner Racing Team, for fourteen years.
He has graduated 13 doctoral and more than 40 master's students and mentored more than 80 undergraduate researchers. Nationally, he chaired the Design Engineering Education Division of the American Society for Engineering Education and chairs the ASME committee on Transforming Engineering Culture to Advance Inclusion and Diversity.
He told the AME faculty in 2017 that leadership is more a function of relationships than position, and that he intended to be an aid to scholarship and teaching rather than an obstacle. He still works that way.
Undergraduate Courses Taught
Graduate Courses Taught
