Dr. M. R. Riazi is the Chair and Professor of Chemical and Natural Gas Engineering (CHNG) at Texas A&M University-Kingsville in Texas, U.S.A. Prior to that he was the managing director and CEO of an oil & gas firm in Montreal, Canada as well as professor of chemical engineering at Kuwait University where he was also chairman of the department. He has a doctorate and MSc degrees in Chemical Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University and a BSc degree in Chemical Engineering with the highest honor from Arya-Mehr (now Sharif) University of Technology. He is the author/co-author of about 150 publications including 7 books in the areas of energy and environment, oil, gas, coal and biofuel properties, characterization, production and processing alongside 10 book chapters including three chapters of the API Technical Data Book – Petroleum Refining. He has presented at over 100 conferences and conducted around 100 invited lectures and workshops for the petroleum and energy industry in more than 40 countries. He has served as an Assistant Professor at Penn State as well as a Visiting Professor in the Departments of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the following universities: Illinois/Chicago, Texas/Austin, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Trondheim), McGill (Montrèal), University of Waterloo (Ontario), Wright State, Sharif University, IIT (India), and Kuwait University. During the past three decades, he was also an invited consultant to many European, American and Middle Eastern oil and energy related companies including Kuwait Oil Company. He has chaired many international conferences in petroleum and chemical engineering as well as the Chair of Fuels & Petrochemical Division in the AIChE Annual Meetings. He is the founding editor of book series on Fuels and Petrochemicals by CRC/Taylor & Francis publishing group. He was an editor for ASTM books on petroleum properties, production and processing and conducted short courses on these topics for the ASTM International. Dr. Riazi is the founding and Editor-in-Chief of IJOGCT as well as editorial board member of several journals in the past three decades. He was an elected director of AIChE Fuel and Petrochemical Division and a past member of SPE, ACS and CIC.

As a result of his work, Dr. Riazi has been honored as the recipient of the following awards: elected Fellow of AIChE in 2013, Diploma of Honor from the U.S. Petroleum Engineering Society for the Outstanding Contributions to the Petroleum Industry and Outstanding Research and Teaching Awards in different universities. He is a licensed professional engineer (P.Eng.) in Ontario, Canada.