Paulo M. S. T. de Castro, born in Porto, Portugal in 1950, obtained his Mechanical Engineering degree of the Universidade do Porto (UP) in 1973, an MSc of Imperial College London in 1975, and a PhD of Cranfield University in 1980. Currently he is a professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP), Portugal. His research interests are mainly in the field of fracture and fatigue. Through several European Union projects, part of his work in the past years was concerned with aeronautics, particularly riveted and integral structures, namely those manufactured using FSW.
Professor de Castro has been involved in several international and national scientific and professional organizations such as ASME (where he was a member of the Board on Professional Practice and Ethics) and others as SEFI, TWI, IOM3, European Group on Fracture, Sociedade Portuguesa de Materiais (SPM), Ordem dos Engenheiros, etc. . He is a correspondent member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, and a member of the editorial board of the journals Fatigue and Fracture of Engineering Materials and Structures and International Journal of Structural Integrity, among others. He spent sabbaticals as Fulbright Scholar at Univ. California Berkeley and visiting scholar at Lehigh University, was an invited professor at the Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille and presented invited lectures at Imperial College, Lehigh Univ., UCBerkeley, Univ. of Maryland and Univs. Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Lille, Napoli, and Salerno, among others.
