Faculty Focus on Professor Marcelo Dapino
Faculty Focus introduces you to our talented scholars who continue to attract the best and brightest engineering students and whose insights and research keep us at the leading edge of innovation and discovery.
Marcelo Dapino
Director, Smart Materials and Structures Lab
What is the focus of your research and why is it significant?
The focus of my research is smart materials and structures. It’s a relatively new field that involves multiple disciplines, incorporating aspects of design, mechanics, dynamics, control engineering, and materials science. Students and researchers in my laboratory engage in devising experiments to understand these materials and explore new smart system designs utilizing analytical and computational methods. A growing interest for us is advanced manufacturing, especially additive manufacturing; we seek to answer fundamental questions surrounding the integration of smart materials within structures. This is important because the transportation industry needs lightweight structures that seamlessly combine different types of materials in addition to smart sensors and actuators. Collaborating with industry and government, we are working on addressing these needs while also trying to anticipate new ones.
Why should a prospective student consider MAE?
Engineering is a critical career for the future. Our programs offer training in academic disciplines, but equally important, they provide a systematic way to learn sound methods and critical thinking. Instilling the ability in our students to become life-long learners is one of our fundamental objectives. Employers appreciate that our graduates can become both intellectual leaders and productive members of the engineering community.
What is your favorite teaching moment?
There are many. A favorite moment is when former students tell me that something they learned from me has been particularly useful to them in their engineering job. There is a strong sense of satisfaction from knowing that I was able to help a new engineering professional in some way.
What advice would you give students considering an engineering career?
It has been said that it takes at least 10 years to be an expert in any given field. If you aspire to be a leader in engineering, you will have to be in it for the long haul. But you can’t do that without being passionate about engineering and accepting the important role that engineers play in improving society. Passion for the profession and commitment to tackling broader societal needs are very important. We are fortunate that engineering offers many opportunities to develop a fruitful, long-term professional career which also benefits others around us.
Tell us something about yourself that most people wouldn’t know.
When I was a graduate student in the late 1990s, I was a staff photographer with my school’s newspaper. We were one of the first schools in the country to convert from a film-based darkroom to an all-digital workflow. Without realizing it, I was part of a technological revolution that has profoundly changed society. For example, social media wouldn’t have happened without digital photography and the next frontier of transportation—self-driving vehicles—will rely on digital image capture and processing as a key enabling technology. Working for the newspaper allowed me to meet interesting people, cover a wide range of events from football games to rock concerts, and even skydive as part of a photo story!