Since July 2015, Maria Cinefra is Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanics and Aerospace Engineering of Politecnico di Torino. After earning two degrees (Bachlor, March 2007, and Master, December 2008) at the Politecnico di Torino, she was enrolled in a Ph.D. (from January 2009 to April 2012) under the supervision of Prof. Carrera at Politecnico di Torino and a foreign co-advisor, Prof. Olivier Polit at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre. Her research project, related to the ’Thermo-mechanical design of multi-layered plates and shell embedding FGM layers’, was funded by the Fonds National de la Recherche of Luxembourg and it was performed in collaboration with the CRP Henri Tudor of Esch (Lux). She was awarded for the best Ph.D paper (Ian Marshall’s Award) at the 16th International Conference on Composite Structures (28-30 June 2011, Porto, Portugal).
She was involved in a collaboration with the Department of Mathematics of Università di Pavia in order to develop an advanced shell finite element based on the Unified Formulation by Carrera for the analysis of structures made of composite, functionally graded and piezo materials. Contemporaneously, she collaborated with Professor Ferreira, editor of the Journal ”Composite Structures”, about the meshless method ’Radial Basis Functions’ combined with the Unified Formulation for the analysis of advanced structures.
Since 2010, she holds teaching activity at the Politecnico di Torino in different courses at Bachelor and Master levels: ‘Fundamentals of Structural Mechanics’, ‘Aeronautic Legislation, human factors and safety’, ’Non-linear analysis of structures’, ’Structures for spatial vehicles’ and ‘Aeroelasticity’. She held also a Ph.D. course at Università del Salento with the title ‘1D and 2D models for the analysis of advanced material structures with multi-field properties through analytical and numerical methods’.
Her research topics cover: composite materials, shell finite elements, FE analysis, meshless methods, smart structures, functionally graded materials, thermal stress analysis, multifield interaction, panel flutter, advanced kinematic theories for plates and shells, mixed variational methods, local-global methods, failure analysis of laminated structures, non-linear problems.
M. Cinefra is author and coauthor of about 60 papers on the above topics, most of which have been published in first rate international journals, as well as a recent book published by J Wiley & Sons with the title ‘Finite Element Analysis of Structures through Unified Formulation’. Cinefra’s papers have had about 1000 citations with h-index=17 (data taken from Scopus).
She was invited to hold a plenary talk in the international conference ICCS18 (Lisbon, June 2015) about ‘FE Shell Formulations for Layered Composite Structures’. She made a contribution as reviewer to about ten international peer-reviwed journals and was on the Editorial Board of some international conferences. M. Cinefra was co-organizer of the ICMNMMCS (Torino, June 2012, chaired by Prof. Carrera and Prof. Ferreira) and of the ECCOMAS SMART 13 conference (Torino, June 2013, chaired by Prof. Carrera).
Associate Professor
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Politecnico di Torino
Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129, Torino, Italy
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