management team

Federico Bosi

Dr Federico Bosi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UCL. Prior to joining in 2017, he was a postdoctoral scholar (2015-2017) in the Space Structure Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, USA. He earned his Ph.D. degree (2014) in Engineering of Civil and Mechanical Structural Systems from the University of Trento, where he was a Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher in the Solid and Structural Mechanics Group. His research activity is devoted to studying the mechanics of solids and structures, with particular interest in the non-linear, time-dependent, and thermo-mechanical response of highly deformable materials and flexible mechanical systems. During his career, he has dealt with problems related to elasticity, viscoelastoplasticity, constitutive modelling of materials, configurational mechanics, large deformation, structural stability, and deployable structures

Adam Bown

Adam Bown, a Director of Tensys Ltd, has over twenty years’ experience in the design, form finding, static and transient analysis and provision of fabrication data for a variety of tensile structures from around the world. Working in the fields of architecture, aerospace, and artistic installations. Notable projects and experience being: Architecture 1) BC Place Stadium, Vancouver; 2) Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok; 3) M11 Monument, Madrid; 4) Munich Olympic Swimming Pool; 5) Waldstadion Frankfurt.

Aerospace ‘lighter than air’ craft: Ongoing design and analysis support to Project Loon communication balloons and the NASA high altitude super pressure balloon program. Design analysis and provision of fabrication information for a number of large-scale heavy lift hybrid air vehicles such as HAV Airlander 10, Lockheed Martin P791 0.5 ton demonstrator and Lockheed Martin P794 and LMH-01 programs.

Artistic installations by artist Anish Kapoor 1) Sectional Body preparing for Monadic Singularity, Palace of Versailles, France; 2) ‘Ark Nova‘ – Japan; 3) ‘Leviathan‘ – Grand Palais, Paris; 4) ‘Marsyas’ Tate Modern, London

Francesco Dal Corso

Francesco Dal Corso is Associate Professor of Solid and Structural Mechanics at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering of the University of Trento, Italy. After earning a PhD in Materials and Structural Engineering at the University of Trento, he had a postdoctoral fellowship with the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, UK. His research activity is devoted to the Mechanical Behaviour of Solid and Structures. In particular, he dealt with problems related to the localisation of deformation, plasticity, large deformations, homogenisation, higher-order continua, stress concentrations and singularities, contact mechanics, configurational mechanics and stability.

Miguel Bessa

Miguel Bessa is an Associate Professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Delft University of Technology. He is also the Director of an inter-faculty Artificial Intelligence lab called MACHINA, dedicated to machine intelligence advances for materials design. In addition, he was the recipient of a Veni personal grant (2019).

Prior to coming to the Netherlands, he was a postdoc scholar in Aerospace at the California Institute of Technology (2017), and received his PhD (2016) in MechEng at Northwestern University as a Fulbright scholar. He has 25 publications and envisions a new era in relation to the design of materials and structures through AI.

Massimo Penasa

Dr. Massimo Penasa is co-founder and director of CAEmate SRL, an Italian innovative software company focused on the development of the cloud-based platform WeStatiX for advanced structural design, engineering workflow automation and structural health monitoring. During his career, he has dealt with the development of innovative constitutive models for brittle materials, numerical techniques for the solution of highly nonlinear problems and automation of design and optimization procedures.

He has wide experience as structural designer and project manager in international infrastructure projects, especially in bridge and tunnel construction. Massimo Penasa is also lecturer for international engineering chambers and for the courses of Computational Mechanics at the University of Trento.

Dr. Penasa has been responsible for tutoring a number of University students during his doctorate programme, together with teaching activities and scientific advisory. He is currently in charge of selection and training of the engineering collaborators at CAEMATE. He achieved personal experience in international joint research programmes, having been involved as ESR in the European project HOTBRICKS- IAPP and having been seconded to multinational companies for the major part of his doctorate programme.

Diego Misseroni

Diego Misseroni is an Assistant Professor of Solid and Structural Mechanics at the University of Trento, Italy. He earned his PhD in ‘Engineering of Civil and Mechanical Structural Systems’ from the University of Trento in 2013. He was a Marie Curie experienced researcher in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Liverpool, UK, in 2014. In 2017, he was awarded the ‘AIMETA Junior Prize’ in Solid and Structural Mechanics (by the Italian Association of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics). Dr. Misseroni is currently involved in two international and two national funded research projects. His research interests are in the field of the Mechanics of Solids and Structures and include wave propagation, metamaterials and origami engineering; buckling and instabilities of structures undergoing large deformations; fracture mechanics; contact mechanics; elasto-plastic modelling and mechanical characterization of traditional and advanced ceramics; bio-inspired and bionic materials. The peculiarity of his research approach is the employment of a broad vision of mechanics. His way of attacking solid and structural mechanics problems is a combination of mechanical modelling, numerical simulation, and experimental validation.

Christoph Paech

Christoph Paech is a director at the structural engineering consultancy office Schlaich Bergermann Partner (SBP) and has over 15 years of experience in design of lightweight architectural projects. With his work in concept development, form finding, structural analysis and detailing he has been responsible for several prestigious and innovative projects all over the world as for example the membrane façade of the Hazza bin Zayed Stadium, the BC Place Stadium in Vancouver, the retractable membrane roof of the Warsaw National Stadium or the recently completed retractable membrane structure of the Al Janoub Stadium in Qatar. Besides his interest in adaptive lightweight structures he has profound knowledge in membrane and foil materials and their recent developments

Eranda Begaj

Eranda obtained a bachelor’s degree in Political Science with orientation in International Relations from Panteion University and a Diploma in European Studies from the University Louvain de Catholique, Belgium. Eranda is the Project Manager for LIGHTEN and is responsible for the financial, contractual, and administrative aspects of the project. Eranda holds the position of the European Project Manager at UCL European Research and Innovation Office.