Personal Presentation

Pedro Camanho (MSc in Mechanical Engineering, University of Porto, 1995) obtained his PhD in Composite Materials from the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London, UK, in 1999. In the same year, he joined the Institute of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Management (INEGI) as Director of the Structural Integrity Unit and the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Porto as an Assistant Professor. Since 2014, he has been a Full Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Porto. He served as President of the Associated Laboratory in Energy, Transportation and Aerospace (LAETA) and, between 2015 and 2024, as Vice-President of INEGI. He was also a member of the executive board of the Council of Associate Laboratories (CLA).

His main research interests focus on the mechanics of deformation and fracture of advanced polymer composite materials across different length and time scales, as well as on the development of new concepts for lightweight composite materials and structures for aerospace applications, including hybrid, nanostructured, multifunctional, variable-stiffness, morphing, energy-storage, and ultra-thin composites.

He serves on the editorial boards of several international scientific journals, including International Journal of Solids and Structures (Elsevier), Composites Part A (Elsevier), European Journal of Computational Mechanics (Taylor & Francis), and Computers, Materials and Continua (Tech Science Press). He has delivered numerous plenary lectures at major international conferences in the fields of fracture mechanics, composite materials, and numerical methods between 2007 and 2024, and has also chaired important international conferences in the area of composites.

He was a Visiting Scientist at NASA Langley Research Center and at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. He has held Visiting Professor positions at several prestigious institutions, including Imperial College London, École Normale Supérieure de Cachan – Université Paris-Saclay, Brown University, and the University of Cambridge.

He coordinated several research projects funded by organizations such as the European Space Agency, Airbus, NASA, Embraer, Daimler AG, Aernnova, the European Union, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. In 2024, he was awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).

He has presented invited seminars at numerous universities and research centers worldwide, spanning Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania.

He has received several awards and honors throughout his career, including the Young Researcher in Applied and Computational Mechanics Award (2005), the NASA H.J.E. Reid Award for Outstanding Scientific Paper (2006), the Cruz Azevedo Award (2007), the Excellence in Research Award from the University of Porto (2020), the Career Award from the Portuguese Society of Fatigue and Structural Integrity (2020), election as Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society (2020), election to the Lisbon Academy of Sciences (2023), the Académie de l’Air et de l’Espace Medal (2024), appointment as Honorary Professor at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2024), and election to the Academy of Engineering of Portugal (2024).

He has published over 160 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, receiving more than 21,000 citations (Scopus h-index of 73). His work has had a significant impact on technology transfer to industry, including the implementation of models and methods in widely used finite element software, as well as the development of failure criteria and experimental methods applied in both the automotive and aeronautical industries.

He was a member of the Council of the European Mechanics Society (EUROMECH) and of the Council of the European Society for Composite Materials (ESCM). He served as Director of the MIT-Portugal doctoral program in Engineering Design and Advanced Manufacturing (EDAM) and chaired the Independent Advisory Board of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Composites at the University of Bristol. He is a member of the Programme Committee of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS) and is co-inventor of a patent on energy harvesting and storage composite structures.

In addition to his scientific activity, he is engaged in photography and scuba diving, and is the author of the book Under fragile seas' ('Sob mares frágeis', Arte e Ciência).