Featured Grantee

Quick Facts

  • Name: Marco Menegozzo
  • Comes from: Italy
  • Lives in: Mayagüez
  • In three words: precise, curious, inventive.
  • Leisure time activities: walking, running, reading books, listening to music, playing basketball.
  • Likes: science, technology, astronomy, geography, history.
  • Unsuspected talent: irony
  • Currently reading: The rivers ran east

 In a nutshell

  • My research matters because… of the need to increase the safety of air, naval, and automotive transportation, but also minimize the structural weight, thus reducing costs and/or improving performances.
  • One of the inspirations for my research has been… To see how sandwich panels can even protect spacecrafts payloads from hypervelocity impacts with micrometeoroids or space debris.
  • The best thing about my job is… To see the process with whom a good idea can become a scientifically proven experiment, and then something that is useful to society.
  • My career highlight so far has been… Setting up a strong research group together with my colleagues and our students.
  • My advice to aspiring researchers is… Be passionate, be proactive, be resilient, ask for advice and accept suggestions, surround yourselves with people who believe in you.

Interview:

Because, since childhood, I have always liked the idea of inventing or discovering something new.

I am working on improving sandwich panels, in order to obtain lighter and safer structures for the aerospace, naval, and automotive fields. After numerical structural analysis, we manufacture the parts and we experimentally test them, in order to validate the numerical results.

The possibility to create customized geometries through generative design and to easily manufacture them through 3D Printing.

  • The fact of pursuing innovation.
  • Seeing that many students are enthusiastic about research and have a great potential as future investigators.
  • Integrating teaching and research.

Because it integrates the analytical approach with “thinking outside the box”.

Teaching and advising students.