Rate My Professor Joaquim Martins

Joaquim R. R. A. Martins is the Pauline M. Sherman Collegiate Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he heads the Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Laboratory. He also holds an appointment as Professor in the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering. In Engineering, his work centers on developing and applying advanced multidisciplinary design optimization techniques to aircraft and other engineering systems, including aerodynamic shape optimization, computational fluid dynamics, sustainable aviation, and high-fidelity aerostructural analysis. Martins earned his M.Eng. in Aeronautics from Imperial College London in 1995, receiving the British Aerospace Award. He obtained his M.Sc. in 1997 and Ph.D. in 2002 in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University, where his doctoral thesis earned the Ballhaus Prize for the best in the department. Before joining Michigan in 2009 as an Associate Professor and later advancing to Full Professor, he served as Assistant and then Associate Professor at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies from 2002 to 2009, holding a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Multidisciplinary Design Optimization.

Martins is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics since 2020 and the Royal Aeronautical Society since 2019. He has received numerous Best Paper Awards at AIAA conferences, including in 2002, 2006, 2012, 2014, 2019, and 2023 for multidisciplinary design optimization and applied aerodynamics, as well as the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship from 2015 to 2016. He has served as Associate Editor for the AIAA Journal, Optimization and Engineering, Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization, and currently the Journal of Aircraft, and was a member of the AIAA Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Technical Committee from 2006 to 2018. Key publications include the textbook Engineering Design Optimization co-authored with Andrew Ning (Cambridge University Press, 2021); Multidisciplinary design optimization: A survey of architectures (2013); The complex-step derivative approximation (2003); OpenMDAO: An open-source framework for multidisciplinary design, analysis, and optimization (2019); and Electric, hybrid, and turboelectric fixed-wing aircraft: A review of concepts, models, and design approaches (2019). His contributions include open-source tools like pyOptSparse, the Surrogate Modeling Toolbox, and MPhys, significantly impacting the field through high-fidelity optimization frameworks used in aerospace design.