Madjid Soltani is a researcher whose work spans sustainable energy systems and biomedical engineering. He is a Fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and an Adjunct Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, where he is affiliated with the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy and the Centre for Bioengineering and Biotechnology. He earned his PhD in chemical engineering at Waterloo and completed postdoctoral training at Johns Hopkins University.
In sustainable energy, Dr. Soltani studies how renewable generation, energy storage and building energy systems can be designed to improve efficiency and resilience. His research covers geothermal, wind and solar energy and examines how storage can help match variable renewable generation with demand. He also applies engineering models and data analytics to building energy use, linking the design of heating, cooling and ventilation systems to how buildings perform. Across these areas, he uses modelling to compare design choices and assess how systems perform under changing conditions.
In biomedical engineering, Dr. Soltani develops computational models to investigate how diseases progress and how treatments reach their targets. His cancer research focuses on how drugs and radiopharmaceuticals move through tumors and how differences among tumors affect treatment delivery. His work also draws on medical imaging and machine learning to study patient-specific questions in diagnosis and treatment. These efforts inform research on digital twins that use patient data to represent disease processes and explore treatment strategies.
Dr. Soltani was named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in 2025. The distinction recognizes researchers who have authored multiple papers in the top 1% by citations for their field and publication year. He also received the University of Waterloo’s 2013 Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies honor for his doctoral research.
His teaching and mentorship span engineering fundamentals and their applications in energy and health. At Balsillie, he contributes an engineering perspective to the STEM for Global Resilience research cluster. His work connects questions about how technologies perform with questions about how they can be evaluated and used in practice, particularly as modelling, data analytics and artificial intelligence inform decisions in the energy and health sectors.