Mehdi Tajvidi is currently the Associate Professor of Renewable Nanomaterials at the School of Forest Resources (SFR), Advanced Structures and Composites Center (ASCC) and the Forest Bioproducts Research Institute (FBRI) at the University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA. Mehdi started his scientific career at the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL), in Madison, WI in 2001 where he worked as a visiting scientist working on his dissertation on dynamic mechanical analysis of wood plastic composites. After completing his Ph.D. program in Natural Resources Engineering at the University of Tehran in 2003, Mehdi worked as an Assistant and Associate Professor at the Department of Wood and Paper Science and Technology, the University of Tehran for 8 years. In 2007, Mehdi received the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) award to do research at the Department of Biomaterials Sciences, the University of Tokyo, Japan where he worked as a Visiting Professor for two years. Upon moving to Canada in 2011, Mehdi worked as a Visiting Professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo, ON, Canada before Joining the School of Forest Resources in September 2013. Mehdi’s areas of research interest are production, characterization and performance evaluation of renewable nanomaterials and their composites. Mehdi’s core research area at UMaine is focused on utilization of cellulose nanomaterials in high volume applications such as coatings, packaging and building products. To date, Mehdi has published over 150 papers in academic journals, presented over 65 presentations at international conferences and advised/co-advised over 50 graduate students and postdocs. Mehdi first attended the Tappi Nano conference in 2015 in Atlanta and is the inaugural recipient of Tappi Nano Division mid-career award in 2018. He also co-chaired the Tappi Nano 2022 conference in Helsinki, Finalnd.