Maria Elizabeth Saade Saade, PhD
About Maria Elizabeth Saade Saade, PhD
Maria Elizabeth Saade Saade, PhD, is the Lead CFD Engineer for Hydrogen Storage at Nikola Motor Company, with extensive experience in computational fluid dynamics and chemical engineering.
Current Position at Nikola Motor Company
Maria Elizabeth Saade Saade serves as the Lead CFD Engineer - Hydrogen Storage at Nikola Motor Company. She joined the company in 2021. Her role specifically focuses on hydrogen storage solutions, leveraging her extensive experience in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to advance technological developments in this sector.
Professional Experience in Hydrogen Storage
Maria Saade has a strong background in hydrogen storage technologies. Prior to her current role, she was a Product Engineer III at Linamar Corporation from 2018 to 2021, where she specialized in CFD for hydrogen storage. This experience has allowed her to develop and refine expertise that is crucial in her current responsibilities at Nikola Motor Company.
Academic Background and Teaching Experience
Maria Saade holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder, obtained between 2007 and 2013. During this period, she designed and implemented a Model Predictive Control System for a solar-thermal reactor. Additionally, she has held teaching positions, including a sessional instructor role at MacEwan University from 2014 to 2016, where she taught engineering topics, and she has extensive experience teaching MATLAB to first-year engineering students.
Early Career and Diverse Industry Experience
Maria Saade's career is marked by a variety of roles across different industries. Early in her career, she worked as part of the production and quality control team at Olga! Gourmet in El Salvador, interned at BASF in Germany, and served as Vice President of Birambye Development, a social start-up in Colorado. These roles provided her with a broad understanding of different engineering applications and environments.
Education and Academic Research
Maria Saade earned her Bachelor's Degree in Chemical Engineering from Tecnológico de Monterrey, followed by a year of study abroad at Hochschule Mannheim. Her academic journey culminated in a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research included significant work in modeling fluid dynamics and heat transfer phenomena using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, such as ANSYS Fluent.