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Sahar Kamalou never expected that what she learned in a graduate school classroom would one day impress a room full of seasoned industry professionals. But that’s exactly what happened, and it changed the way she sees her own work.

Kamalou, a PhD candidate in civil engineering and geomatics at Oregon State University, came to the United States from Iran with a clear goal: to push the boundaries of geospatial technology. After completing her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Iran, she began searching for PhD programs with strong geomatics departments. Oregon State stood out. “They have awesome professors,” she says. She applied, interviewed with advisors Ezra Cheh and Mike Olsen, now her advisor and department head, and was accepted. 

Navigating the visa process and eventually arriving in the US, she says simply: “I came here and made my dreams true.”

Her research focuses on a problem with real consequences: how to efficiently and safely collect data along miles of public highways. Traditional field surveys, she explains, are “time-consuming, labor-intensive, cost a lot, and put personnel in significant safety risk especially on a statewide scale.” Mobile lidar systems offer a faster, safer, and more cost-effective alternative. However, the data they produce is another challenge entirely. “They are very big and dense spatial data. They’re really complex. They include noise.” Processing it all manually defeats the purpose.

Kamalou’s PhD work, conducted in partnership with the Oregon Department of Transportation, aims to solve this by developing an automated, scalable framework to extract roadway information from mobile lidar data and analyze how that information relates to crash statistics. The goal: give transportation agencies a smarter, more efficient tool for highway safety analysis and asset management.

That work earned her the GeoWeek 2025 scholarship award, recognition that opened a door she didn’t see coming.

The award led to an internship with Impulse Radar, and it proved to be a turning point both professionally and personally. On the professional side, Kamalou was asked to do something she hadn’t fully anticipated, like training experienced industry professionals on lidar processing and photogrammetry workflows. “I even didn’t realize that there is a gap between academia and industry,” she admits. In graduate school, surrounded by researchers who all understood the technical details, she had assumed that knowledge was common. It wasn’t. “Matt Wolf, my boss, recognized that there is a significant gap between simply buying a lidar system, downloading the software and following YouTube, and understanding the academic procedure behind data collection, processing, and quality assessment.”

Teaching seasoned professionals reframed how Kamalou thought about her own education. “It was the first time I truly realized that the knowledge I had gained during graduate school was really valuable, practical, and in demand.” When she returned to campus after the internship, she approached her coursework differently. “Before, I was just doing assignments to meet deadlines. Afterwards, I found out how much in demand is what we learn in school.” 

She sees PhD students like herself as uniquely positioned, “We are the people who fill this gap.”

The internship also gave her something she hadn’t expected to find so far from home. Impulse Radar founder Matt Wolf and his wife Katie welcomed Kamalou and her husband warmly. She formed a lasting friendship with Matt’s daughter, Rachel, and the two still exchange book recommendations and food recipes, and their husbands golf together. “We really made a great bond.”

The professional ripple effects have been just as meaningful. Kamalou presented her internship and PhD research to the Impulse Radar team visiting from Sweden, who were impressed enough to explore potential future research collaboration. Through conferences she attended alongside Matt including the UESI Pipeline Conference, ASPE, and GEBIC she connected with professionals across the field and built a network that continues to grow.

For those curious about the research itself, Kamalou delivered a TEDx-style talk detailing her work into an accessible five-minute presentation for general audiences. The video is available on YouTube here.

“I learned a lot from them too,” she says of the Impulse Radar team, the GPR data processing, field workflows, and industry perspective she absorbed alongside her PhD work. “It was a really great experience. I’m really grateful.”