Feature | Mohammad Fard
Mohammad Fard: Passing on the passion to young engineers Steve Jobs once said: “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Without any doubt it was love that drew the SAE-A’s most recent chair Dr Mohammad Fard to mechanical engineering, and in his case, it was an enigmatic love for Nissan cars. As Mohammad explains, it wasn’t that he didn’t like other car company’s products, but he was attracted from a young age to Nissan powertrains. His heart led him down the path that has grown into an amazing career that has and will continue to change how we work and design motor cars, and the passion he instils into his engineering students.
Initially Mohammad studied in his native Iran obtaining his undergraduate mechanical engineering degree and then his master’s in mechanical engineering from the University of Tehran. But then his love of Nissan cars drew him to Japan and specifically to the University of Tohoku in Tokyo. “The reason I went there; I wanted to work in the automotive industry particularly in Nissan because I had an interest in Nissan cars,” he said. “That was one reason I decided to go to Japan to do my PhD and I was searching for a good university. And the research topic was one I liked so that’s why I went there.” Mohammad obtained a Japanese government scholarship to attend the university and they arranged a few months of intensive Japanese language instruction that included learning about Japanese characters to understand the concept. Before arriving in Japan, he had taught himself some basic Japanese and then as he said, from the first day in Japan he pushed himself to express himself in Japanese. After obtaining his PhD he did find his way into work at Nissan which no doubt made his heart sing as finally he was where he dreamt of working, which he did as a CAE design engineer at the Nissan Technical Centre for five years. “When I decided to leave Nissan, I had a good job, it was a very difficult decision for me to leave,” Mohammad explained.
22 | March 2021
