Mr. Vakili is currently a consultant in the friction material industry. Throughout his career he has held numerous positions including the Vice President of Technology & International for Fritec; Director & VP of Technical Services in the friction material industries and various related industries including Wagner Automotive, HKM, ITT, and Continental. He has traveled extensively around the world and visited most "who's who" of the friction manufacturing industries in order to select the best suitable products for a given OE or OES application. Mr. Vakili recently was a co-publisher of a research work on Automotive Wheel Dust Evaluation & Testing with Ford Motor Co. and Link Engineering. He has been a speaker and chairperson at the Brake Colloquium, FMSI, and BMC and has taught a course in "Friction Material Topics" for Continental Automotive System employees in the U.S. and Europe. A member of AIChE and SAE, Mr. Vakili has a B.S. and M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts with post graduate studies in Particle Size Analysis at the University of Bradford, UK.