Growing up in the Zagros mountains of Kurdistan allowed me to start exploring the surrounding geology during my childhood. I was curious about the karst features (caves and holes), rigid cliffs, and fossils in the carbonates; colorful pebbles along the stream banks; fresh, white surfaces of limestone building stones; and gypsum, marl, and clay used as building materials. From there, I can sketch the changes in the stream course, 100 m away from our residence, over the last 30 years since my childhood. Being 10 kilometers away from the mountain front, I saw and wondered about the difference between the topography of the high mountains where I lived and the topography of foothills to the south. Nowadays, I am interested in understanding the structural development of the Earth's crust (especially fold-thrust belts), its expression in the evolved landscape, and the tectonic geomorphology of various settings. My work is based on field observations, remote sensing techniques (including InSAR), landscape modeling, and geochronology.

Currently, I am working on understanding landscape evolution and denudation rates in the Bohemian Massif (an intraplate setting). I am also involved in a project on active tectonics and the landscape of the East African Rift (an extensional setting).

Recently, I have been analyzing ground surface deformation of the salt diapirs in the southeastern part of the Zagros in Iran using PSI-SAR data (a convergent plate boundary).

Previously, I worked on constraining structural models (balanced cross-sections) for the NW segment of the Zagros Fold-Thrust Belt in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and on determining long-term fault slip rates in several structures by integrating these structural models with uplift rates of river terraces obtained from luminescence dating. I also worked on understanding the interaction between growing anticlines and topographic evolution there (a convergent plate boundary).