Dr. Hussam Mahmoud now holds a joint faculty appointment with the School of Biomedical Engineering at CSU. His main bioengineering research is aimed at developing probabilistic frameworks for the evaluation of the risk of failure of biological tissues on the component and system levels. Dr. Mahmoud’s current research focuses on mitigating risk of premature labor through probabilistic evaluation of cervix-uterus interaction on the system level. Traditional methods of assessing the risk of early labor have only focused on the cervix as opposed to the cervical-uterus systems. The simulated systems are assessed in terms of the cervical opening as a performance parameter since it is a direct indicator of cervical failure. Dr. Mahmoud’s graduate class on Mechanics of Fatigue and Fracture highlights the cross-linking between different fields by covering a wide range of topics ranging from failures in steel bridges and ship structures to hard tissues including bone and teeth.