Dr Emilio Martínez-Pañeda of Imperial College London has been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, which aims to develop the next wave of world-class research and innovation leaders in academia and business.

This scheme provides up to seven years of support for Dr Martínez-Pañeda’s project ‘New Phase Field Models for Unravelling Multi-Physics Material Degradation Challenges’ (NEWPHASE).

Dr Martínez-Pañeda is a lecturer and Research Fellow at Imperial College London, where he leads the Mechanics of Infrastructure Materials research group. His research efforts aim at understanding, predicting and optimising the mechanical response of materials. He combines experiments, theoretical analysis and computer simulations to develop mechanistic models that can reliably capture material deformation and fracture.

Earlier in 2021 he was named as one of five winners of the RAEng Engineers Trust Young Engineer of the Year competition.

UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships 

Future Leaders Fellowships support talented people in universities, businesses, and other research and innovation environments. They also allow universities and businesses to develop their most talented early career researchers and innovators or to attract new people to their organisations, including from overseas.