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. His research ranges from developing new MDO techniques to applying those techniques to the design of aircraft and other engineering systems. He is a co-author of “Engineering Design Optimization”, a textbook published by Cambridge University Press.
Prof. Martins is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. Before joining the University of Michigan faculty in 2009, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, where from 2002 he held a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Multidisciplinary Optimization. He received his undergraduate degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Imperial College, London, with a British Aerospace Award. He obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University, where he was awarded the Ballhaus prize for best thesis in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He has received the Best Paper Award in AIAA Conferences five times. He was a member of the AIAA MDO Technical Committee (2006–2018) and was the technical co-chair for the 2008 AIAA Multidisciplinary Analysis and Optimization Conference. He has served as Associate Editor for the AIAA Journal, Optimization and Engineering, and Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization. He is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of Aircraft.
Anant Grewal has been a Research Officer at NRC’s Aerospace Research Centre since 1994, apart from the period from 2000 to 2006 when he worked in industry. In 2015, he was promoted to the grade of Principal Research Officer. From 2012 to 2019, Anant assumed the role of Program Leader of the Working and Travelling on Aircraft program at the NRC. In this capacity he led NRC’s research program in the area of the aircraft cabin environment, and cabin human factors, health and safety. He continues as the Air Travel Research Focus Area Leader at NRC.
As a Research Officer, he has been leading collaborative R&D and Technical Services projects in the areas of acoustics, structural dynamics, aeroelasticity, multidisciplinary analysis and optimization and smart structures applications with industrial and government partners. In addition to the NRC, Anant also worked as a Senior Designer at Nortel Networks, and as a Defence Scientist with the Canadian Department of National Defence. Anant is currently also an Adjunct Professor at the Toronto Metropolitan University in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. Anant is currently a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Structural Dynamics Technical Committee, as well as an Associate Fellow of AIAA.
Melike Nikbay is a Professor at the Istanbul Technical University, where she heads the Aerospace Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Laboratory. Her research interests include advanced computational design, multidisciplinary analysis and optimization, multi-fidelity modeling, surrogate modeling, machine learning, uncertainty quantification, aeroelasticity and aeroelastic optimization, fluid-structure interaction, sensitivity analysis (direct and adjoint methods), reliability-based design optimization, robust and stochastic optimization, and sonic boom minimization. Dr. Nikbay is the Chair of the Department of Astronautical Engineering since May 2024, and an Executive Board Member of TÜBİTAK’s Space Technologies Research Group since 2024.
Prior to her full-time academic career in 2004, Dr. Nikbay served as R&D Leader at multiple industries, was a visiting researcher at the USAF Wright-Patterson Multidisciplinary Science and Technology Center in Ohio, and led a project at NASA Langley Research Center on “The Impact of Aeroelastic Uncertainty on Low Sonic Boom Aircraft Shaping Optimization” as part of the Commercial Supersonic Aircraft Technology program. Dr. Nikbay earned her B.S. (1996) and M.S. (1998) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Boğaziçi University, Türkiye. She later obtained a second M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder, USA, in 1999. In 2002, she completed her Ph.D. under the mentorship of Prof. Charbel Farhat. Dr. Nikbay has been a representative of Türkiye in the NATO Science and Technology Organization (STO) Applied Vehicle Technology (AVT) Panel since 2008, contributing extensively through various leadership roles. She currently serves as a member of the Scientific Committee of the NATO STO AVT Panel, Director of the AVT-385 Research Lecture Series on “Multi-Fidelity Methods for Multidisciplinary Design Optimization,” and co-chair of the AVT-411-RSM program on “Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for Military Vehicle Design.” Since 2010, Dr. Nikbay has also served as an External Expert Evaluator for the European Commission’s Clean Sky and EISMEA programs in aviation. Her achievements include recognition as an AIAA Associate Fellow (2017) and prestigious awards, such as the NATO STO “Young Contributor” Award (2016) and the NATO STO “Panel Excellence” Award (2024).
Ögmundur is the eXpert for Airframe Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization at Airbus Defence and Space in Manching, Germany. He is responsible for the development of the in-house multidisciplinary structural optimisation tool Lagrange and the application of MDO to airframe design tasks in both civil and military aircraft programmes including the A350, for which the team received an award for engineering excellence, and within the FCAS project. He has led the activities of Airbus Defence and Space in numerous national and European research projects on the topic of MDO, most recently within the Clean Aviation Joint Undertaking of the European Commission and Industry.
Ögmundur completed his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Iceland and Master’s degree at the Technische Universität München in Germany before joining Airbus Defence and Space where he has since worked in the team for Stress Methods and Optimization within the Airframe Centre of Competence. Current research topics focus mostly on the creation of coupled digital design platforms, leveraging optimisation techniques, existing capabilities in disciplinary analysis and recent advances in sensitivity analysis to enable efficient design of coupled systems.