The bridgebuilder in Houston
From Tehran to Texas, by way of France and Trondheim, the road to NGI’s Houston office was anything but direct. Today, Mohammad Ali Salehi builds a bridge between geotechnics and geoscience, turning complex seabed data into models that entire project teams can rely on.
Ali at work in Houston, interpreting seismic profiles and building the 3D ground models that bring NGI’s geotechnical data into one picture. ( Photo: NGI)
Mohammad Ali Salehi goes by Ali. Everyone in Houston calls him that, and the name tends to elicit a reaction. When he arrived in the United States, the immigration officer looked down at his passport, then looked up.
“Oh, Mohammad Ali,” the officer said, perfectly deadpan. Ali grins at the memory. “Just like that. You know, it happens.”
While he shares a name with the legendary heavyweight champion, the Ali his NGI colleagues know is a heavy hitter in a different arena. Since joining NGI nearly three years ago, Salehi has worked from a small office in Texas, integrating borehole samples, cone penetration tests (CPTs), and seismic data into ground models that help engineers make safer decisions about offshore installations. The work connects disciplines that do not always speak the same language, and it links Houston to Oslo, Perth, and wherever else in the world a project takes him.
“I have a combination of different kinds of backgrounds, and I can use many of them at NGI,” says Salehi.
A path that never ran straight
Salehi was born in Iran, where he studied petroleum engineering before moving to France to pursue a master’s degree in petroleum geoscience at the IFP School. He later began a PhD at NTNU in Trondheim, but a family emergency forced him to return to Iran after just one month. He stayed for six years, watching the situation in his country deteriorate.
In 2021, Ali moved to the United States, where he continued to build his digital skill set through data science and deep learning programs at the University of Texas at Austin, adding machine learning, analytics, and Python-based automation to his geoscience background. When the position at NGI Houston came up, he applied.
Salehi’s family remains in Iran, and recent events have made the distance feel especially real. He says the experience has reinforced something he has learned many times in life: the importance of adapting without losing focus.
“Life is like a sinusoid. Sometimes it’s up, sometimes it’s down. We have to adapt ourselves as soon as possible to the situation we are in, otherwise we stop there, and stopping means losing something in our lives,” he says.
A weekend off in Tampa, Florida. Here, Ali swaps subsurface models for a zip line across the water. ( Photo: Private)
Building a common language underground
The core of Salehi’s work at NGI sits at the boundary between two disciplines. Geotechnical data, boreholes, and CPTs provide direct, physical measurements of the seabed. Seismic data provide spatial continuity over large areas but are indirect measurements. His job is to combine the two into a ground model, a unified picture of the subsurface that the whole project team can use. His background in petroleum geoscience gives him a strong understanding of seismic interpretation and subsurface uncertainty. At the same time, his more recent work in data science enables him to automate workflows, integrate large datasets, and develop digital tools. The combination helps him translate complex subsurface information into models that are useful to both technical specialists and decision-makers.
“The geologist, the geophysicist, the geotechnical engineers, and even the managers can sit together and see that model, which has all the information inside. They can have a common language and talk about it and make a decision-making road that leads them to the best choice for that field,” he says.
The Maromba project is one example. Salehi worked closely with colleagues in Oslo to build a ground model for the field, coordinating across time zones and disciplines. The model gave engineers and clients a shared reference point for where and how to place offshore structures safely. He has contributed to several other projects in the same way.
When Ali joined NGI, he had to adjust his own vocabulary as well. In oil and gas, subsurface holes are called wells. At NGI, they are boreholes or CPTs.
“In the first days, I said, ‘in this well,’ and they said that this is not a well, we call it a borehole,” he recalls. “So it’s better to have a common language. From very simple things, I started to improve myself and correct my terminology.”
The collaboration with Oslo has been straightforward, he says, even across the time difference.
“When I reach out, the people are very nice and very helpful, and we are working towards the same goal.”
Houston, Ali’s base and, in his words, a door to the world’s energy market. The skyline seen from Buffalo Bayou Park. ( Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Houston is a door to new markets
Salehi sees the Houston office as an entry point to the global energy market. Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) and geothermal energy are both gaining traction in the region, and he believes NGI is well-positioned to grow alongside its established work in oil and gas and offshore renewables.
“Here is a kind of door to the energy environment for the world. The more things you have in the basket, the less vulnerable you are. If something is going down, something else is going up,” Ali says.
For Salehi personally, working at NGI also means seeing the consequences of his models in real time. In large oil and gas companies, he says, a model could sit unused for two or three years before anyone acted on it. At NGI, the loop is shorter.
“Here I have the opportunity to see exactly the consequence of the work I’m doing. That is very satisfying,” he says.
Code on the weekend
On weekends, Ali often sits down at his computer to code. It is a long-standing interest, and at NGI it has found a new outlet. He is currently developing software in Python for the advanced testing laboratory in Houston. Once finalized, the code will be uploaded to the cloud and made available to all NGI staff globally, turning a local project into a shared resource across the organisation.
It is, in miniature, what Salehi does every working day: building something designed to travel across distances, disciplines,f and borders. For him, that combination of expertise, collaboration, and practical impact is what makes NGI a meaningful place to work.
“I think NGI is a knowledge-driven organisation. You have very good specialists sitting together, and if you have any questions regarding geoscience or geotechnics, you will find a very competent person, sometimes an internationally recognised reference. It’s really something to be part of that,” Ali Salehi concludes with a proud smile.
