Topic of Invited talk

Varicomposites: spatially and temporally variable properties for highly efficient and sustainable performance

Biography

Paul Weaver has held the position of Bernal Chair of Composite Materials and their Structures at the University of Limerick since 2016 and has been Professor of Lightweight Structures at the University of Bristol since 2009, having been at Bristol for 25 years. Paul’s expertise lies in developing new design concepts and methods with lightweight composite structures. He has led partnerships with Vestas Wind Systems and ORE Catapult on wind turbine blades and has been a consultant to NASA for 12 years, and a principal or co-principal investigator of grants totalling >50MEuro. Currently, he holds a Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Research Professorship (€6.4M) entitled Varicomp which brings together his interests in both shape changing and lightweight composite structures. He recently held a Royal Society Wolfson Merit award and was previously an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow. He has been Director for the Centre of Doctoral Training in Advanced Composites since 2008 where he has overseen the graduation of more than 140 PhD students. His research team have won nine best paper awards in recent years and Paul has successfully supervised 49 PhD students to completion and has published in excess of 500 refereed journal and conference articles.