Alberto Pirrera is a Lecturer in Composite Structures and currently holds an EPSRC Early Career Research Fellowship (2015-2020) at the Department of Aerospace Engineering of the University of Bristol, where he has been a faculty member since 2013 and where he completed his PhD in 2011. Before that, Alberto obtained his Master’s in Aerospace Engineering from Università degli Studi di Palermo, in Italy. His academic home is the Advanced Composites Centre for Innovation & Science (ACCIS), where he is actively involved with its Centre for Doctoral Training. A modeller and a theoretician specialising in engineering science, Alberto’s research interests lie in the area of structural analysis, design and optimisation. In recent years, he has focused on well-behaved nonlinear structures, on morphing, adaptive and shape changing devices and on wind turbine blades.