Pooya worked on designing symmetric variations of the Miura-ori. The Miura fold pattern, or the Miura-ori, is a flat-foldable origami tessellation which has been applied to the folding of engineering structures. These structures include the solar panels for the Japanese solar system probe satellite, as well as deployable structures for various architectural applications.
The main aim of Pooya’s PhD was to generalise the Miura-ori symmetrically and systematically, and to design and develop a family of descendant tessellations for this pattern. He showed that, through appropriate design variations on the original pattern, it can be used to systematically design flat-foldable tessellations with a variety of quadrilateral facets, which are either globally planar, or globally curved. At a broader level, he developed a framework which can be utilised to generalise functional origami tessellations.