Mahdi Ghalibafian

Dr. Mahdi Ghalibafian was born in Tabriz in 1935. After ending the elementary education, he finished his first two years of junior high school in Ferdosi High School in his birthplace. Then he moved to Tehran and completed his recent school-time in Sharaf High School. Afterwards Dr Ghalibafian was graduated in the field of structure in Civil Engineering department of University of Tehran in 1959. He was working as the director of the first part of “Avaj- Pahlavi” road in Technic Corporation during November 1959 till September 1960. Succeeding that, he proceeded to design and analyze some high or small buildings in a computational team from SANO Structural Engineers which had been founded by Fereydoun Saeidi and Hoshiyar Noushin (current Dr Noushin) whom Dr Ghalibafian had gone to college of engineering with. Some of these buildings which were engineered in one and a half year consist of Philips Structure located in Enqelab Street near the Ferdosi Square and several clinics of Social Insurances in Tehran. Philips building is the first concrete structure designed based on seismic methods in Iran.

Dr Ghalibafian has written 18 books in Persian, two books in French, over 80 papers, one paper in French, and tw papers in English about engineering, planning, construction and retrofitting and has submitted over 70 presentations in various conferences. He has worked on providing over 50 officially technical documents as listed below:

13 national standards for Institute of Standards and Industrial Research of Iran (ISIRI), 19 technical publications for Management and Planning Organization like Iranian Concrete Code (the first and the revised version), 10 subjects of national construction regulations for the ministry of housing and urban development, a proficiency standard and a didactic pamphlet for the seismic design of bridge for Tehran municipality, 5 publications in building & housing research center like Standard 519 (minimum load on buildings) and the first and the revised version of Standard 2800 (Iranian code for seismic resistance design of building).

Dr Mahdi Ghalibafian had a very special personality in his life and work and the father of Iranian concrete science is proper for his prominent character.

He died on Tuesday 12 June 2007 at the age of 71.