Profile

Hélder C. Rodrigues has been a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, since 2010. He obtained his PhD in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan, USA, in July 1988, followed by a Post-Doctorate at the Technical University of Denmark.

For his PhD research work, he was awarded the Ivor McIvor Award in Applied Mechanics from the University of Michigan. He was a Fulbright grantee at the University of Iowa from September to March 1984. In 1994 and 1997, he was a visiting professor at the Technical University of Denmark and the University of Michigan. Co-editor of the scientific journal Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization, Springer, between 2012 and 2022, he is currently Senior Advisor of this journal and member of the editorial board of the journals “Periodica Polytechnica Civil Engineering”, Budapest University of Technology and Economics. and “Strojnícky časopis – Journal of Mechanical Engineering”, Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava.

He was president of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico (2011-2016) and a member of the Scientific Council of this Institute between 2021 and 2024. He is a senior researcher at LAETA _ Associated Laboratory of Energy, Transports and Aeronautics and was coordinator of the Mechanical Design Centre at IST between 1998 and 2024. He has been a member of the CISM-Centre International des Sciences Mécaniques Board of Directors, Udine, Italy (appointed by FCT—Foundation for Science and Technology) since 2016.

His research areas are computational mechanics and structural optimisation, with applications in composite materials design and biomechanics.