Houston Gave Me a Place to Grow

Editor's note: This interview was developed from conversations with Dr. Medai Abadi (Dr. Mohammadmehdi Ezzatabadipour). His answers were edited for clarity while preserving his meaning and first-person voice.

When did your relationship with Houston begin?

Dr. Medai: I came to the United States in 2013 and came directly to Houston. I was 23 years old. I had just completed my undergraduate education, and the University of Houston Department of Physics admitted me into its PhD program with funding. I did not complete a master's degree first. The university's Physics program accepts qualified students from a bachelor's degree, but for me, coming from another country and entering that path directly still felt enormous.

I arrived young, academically prepared in some ways, immature in others, and hardly able to speak English with confidence. Houston did not ask me to arrive finished. People taught me, tolerated my mistakes, helped me communicate, funded my studies and research, and gradually treated me as one of their own.

Why do you say you feel indebted to Houston and Texas?

Dr. Medai: Because debt is not always a bank transaction. Sometimes a community gives a young person safety, time, education, work, friendship, and a chance to become useful. Houston and Texas gave me those things when very few people outside my family could.

The University of Houston educated me further and helped me become part of American scientific and professional life. This city helped me find work and learn what responsible citizenship looks like in practice. I cannot calculate that care on a spreadsheet. I can only ask how to return some portion of it through the work I do here.

Who taught you that work could be a form of service?

Dr. Medai: My mother. I was raised by a single mother who was a teacher, educator, entrepreneur, and farmer. She worked ten or twelve hours a day to provide for us. Her life did not separate intelligence from labor or care from responsibility. She could teach, build, manage, cultivate, and keep moving.

I recognize parts of her in myself now. Curiosity, stubbornness, education, entrepreneurship, and the belief that knowledge is not valuable unless it helps somebody live better. She was my first example. Houston became another. Both taught me that receiving an opportunity creates an obligation to make opportunity possible for somebody else.

Which professors shaped the scientist and person you became?

Dr. Medai: Dr. Kevin E. Bassler was my PhD advisor, supervised my University of Houston dissertation, and remains one of the central role models of my life. He is now Chair of the University of Houston Department of Physics and Moores Professor of Physics and Mathematics. His principles, discipline, hard work, and way of searching for the fundamental structure beneath a complex system guided me then, guide me now, and will continue to guide me.

Under Dr. Bassler's supervision, I worked on complex network dynamics. Dr. Royce K. P. Zia was also my beloved mentor in this work and in the discipline of analytical thinking. I see him as an academic and analytical father. He is a wonderful physicist and teacher, and I remain deeply indebted to him.

Dr. Zia masterfully taught us to turn an extremely hard problem into smaller, simpler problems, solve them one by one, and then return to the whole with greater understanding. He called the method divide and conquer, but he taught us to use it for the greater good. That lesson still shapes how I approach physics, technology, organizations, and difficult client problems. His public work spans non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and complex systems, including a major review of fluctuations and correlations in systems driven far from equilibrium.

I entered UH directly from my undergraduate degree without first holding a master's degree. During the master's-stage portion of that graduate training, Dr. Margaret S. Cheung was one of my professors and research supervisors. Our work included The Role of Hydrodynamic Interactions in the Rate of Protein Folding, published under my legal name, Mohammadmehdi Ezzatabadipour. She taught me that quality has a real cost: patience, repetition, another calculation, and sometimes a night when the work mattered more than sleep. I do not mean exhaustion is a virtue. I mean she refused to let convenience become the standard for scientific work. She is now a computational scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, with continuing academic appointments documented by her Rice University profile. Her broader career and research record are also available through Wikipedia and Google Scholar.

These mentors showed me that intelligence without discipline is unfinished. They cared about the model, the evidence, and the student doing the work. When I insist today that technology or marketing must be built from fundamentals, divided into solvable parts, and tested honestly, part of that insistence comes from their classrooms and research groups.

You earned a doctorate and published research. Do you still practice mathematics?

Dr. Medai: Every day for clients, and every night for my joy, pleasure, and fun.

I completed my PhD in Physics at the University of Houston in 2019. My work centered on theoretical and computational physics, statistical mechanics, complex systems, complex network dynamics, and mathematics. My Google Scholar profile records part of that research, including complex networks and deep-learning applications. Industry did not remove mathematics from my life. It changed where the equations meet reality.

The whiteboards in my office remain covered with models, vectors, allocation problems, and unfinished calculations. Some belong to a client's operational problem. Some exist because a question followed me home and refused to leave. Mathematics is not a credential I completed in 2019. It is still one of the ways I experience pleasure.

How did research become a mission to serve local businesses?

Dr. Medai: A model is useful when it helps us understand a system well enough to act responsibly. The same principle applies to a business. You study the people, incentives, constraints, failures, and feedback loops. Then you build something that helps the system serve people better.

My career moved through energy, data science, machine learning, cloud systems, optimization, and product work before I founded Medai Digital LLC. The tools changed. The habit did not. I still ask: What are we overlooking? What fails first? Who benefits? What would make this system more useful to the person depending on it?

What do you want Houston to receive from you now?

Dr. Medai: I cannot repay a city in one gesture. I can work here, teach what I know, help honest local companies compete, and spend my days making useful systems available to people who are usually ignored by the technology economy.

I share parts of that work on LinkedIn, but the real return is quieter. A family business gets found. A client understands where a lead came from. A small team receives technology that once belonged only to large corporations. A good craft becomes visible without pretending to be something it is not. That is how I try to say thank you to Houston.