Francesco Tornabene is an Associate Professor at the School of Engineering, Department of Engineering for Innovation, University of Salento. He was born on 13 January 1978 in Bologna, where he received the high school degree at Liceo Classico San Luigi, in 1997. In 2001 he achieved a National Patent Bologna (Italy) for the Industrial Invention: Friction Clutch for High Performance Vehicles Question BO2001A00442. He received from the University of Bologna - Alma Mater Studiorum, a M.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering (Curriculum in Structural Mechanics), on 23/07/2003, discussing a thesis entitled: “Dynamic Behavior of Cylindrical Shells: Formulation and Solution”. In December 2003, he was admitted at the PhD course in Structural Mechanics, at the University of Bologna, reaching the first position in the competitive admission. In 2004, he received from the University of Bologna a thesis prize in memory of Carlo Felice Jodi; in 2007 he received the Ph.D. degree in Structural Mechanics at the University of Bologna, discussing the Thesis entitled “Modeling and Solution of Shell Structures Made of Anisotropic Materials”. From 2007 to 2009 he received a research fellowship by the University of Bologna, working on the “Unified Formulation of Shell Structures Made of Anisotropic Materials. Numerical Analysis Using the Generalized Differential Quadrature Method and the Finite Element Method”. From 2011 to 2012 he became a junior researcher within the research program entitled “Advanced Numerical Schemes for Anisotropic Materials”; from 2012 to 2018 he was an Assistant Professor and Lecturer at the Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna; from 2018 up to date he is an Assistant Professor in Structural Mechanics and Lecturer at the University of Salento, Department of Innovation Engineering (Lecce). For a long time, his scientific interests include the Structural Mechanics, Solid Mechanics, Innovative and Smart Materials, Computational Mechanics and Numerical Techniques, Damage and Fracture Mechanics. He is author of more than 260 scientific publications, and collaborates with many national or international researchers and professors all over the world, as visible from his scientific production. He is author of 11 books, see e.g. “Meccanica delle Strutture a Guscio in Materiale Composito. Il metodo Generalizzato di Quadratura Differenziale” (2012); “Mechanics of Laminated Composite Doubly-Curved Shell Structures. The Generalized Differential Quadrature Method and the Strong Formulation Finite Element Method” (2014); “Laminated Composite Doubly-Curved Shell Structures I. Differential Geometry. Higher-Order Structural Theories” (2016); “Laminated Composite Doubly-Curved Shell Structures II. Differential and Integral Quadrature. Strong Formulation Finite Element Method” (2016), “Anisotropic Doubly-Curved Shells. Higher-Order Strong and Weak Formulations for Arbitrarily Shaped Shell Structures” (2018), among many. He is member of the Editorial Board for 42 International Journals (see, e.g. Journal of Engineering, International Journal of Engineering & Applied Sciences, Composite Structures, Technologies, Journal of Applied and Computational Mechanics, Journal of Composites Science, Advanced Materials and Technologies, Heliyon, International Scholarly Research Notices, Mathematical Problems in Engineering, ISRN Mechanical Engineering, Journal of Computational Engineering, Advances in Aircraft and Spacecraft Science, among others). He is also Editor-in-Chief for 2 International Journals: Curved and Layered Structures and Journal of Composites Science; from 2019 he is Associate Editor for the International Journal Mechanics Based Design of Structures and Machines. In the last years he received different important awards, see e.g. “Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics” (years 2018, 2019, 2020), “Ambassador of Bologna Award for the organization of 21st International Conference on Composite Structures ICCS21, 4-7 September 2018, Bologna, Italy” (2019), “Member of the European Academy of Sciences” (since 2018) ), and “Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award” (2024-2025), among others. He collaborates as reviewer with more than 300 prestigious international journals in the structural mechanics’ field. From 2012, his teaching activity includes Dynamics of Structures; Computational Mechanics; Plates and Shells; Theory of Structures; Structural Mechanics or Mechanics of Solids and Structures.
