Houman is working toward his PhD in Electrical Engineering at USF. His objective for graduate (PhD) studies is to prepare himself for the long-term goal of pursuing a career of teaching and research in the field of energy harvesting, as a University professor. He is working in the field of clean energy harvesting with emphasize on “Protein Based Solar Cells”, a novel idea. Houman is working on the application of photosynthetic proteins in harvesting solar energy. In his PhD project, he is developing a new approach in deploying biomaterials for building solar cells. In addition, he has initiated a new research project in the lab, for which he is supervising an undergraduate student, Victoria Coraci, working on “selfcleaning coatings”. He was the instructor for "Foundations of Engineering", in the fall of 2011. Houman is the recipient of 2012/13 Davinci Engineering Award. He is also the recipient of 2012 I'CAMP Fellowship Award. He got his M.Sc. in Material Science and Engineering in which he was working on the development of TiO2 selfcleaning coatings on plastic substrates under Dr. Nima Taghavinia’s supervision at Physics Department at Sharif University of technology and Dr. Eskandar Keshavarz’s supervison at Materials and Energy Research Center (MERC). He got his bachelor in Material Science and Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran..