Mahmoud was born in the coastal city of Monastir, Tunisia. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering at the National Engineering School of Tunis, Tunisia in 2017. He has soon after started his PhD in civil engineering at Laval University, Québec city in January 2018. Mahmoud’s thesis is about the fatigue optimization and quality control of friction stir welded joints in aluminum highway bridge decks. He has been conducting both small- and large-scale fatigue tests on realistic representative specimens. His project also involves advanced numerical analysis aiming to estimate accurately the fatigue performance of friction stir welded specimens. Mahmoud is supervised by Prof. Charles Darwin Annan from Laval University and Prof. Scott Walbridge from the University of Waterloo. He likes playing soccer and watching movies in his free time.