The Royal Academy of Engineering has elected Jaime Domínguez Abascal as its new president

The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAI) has elected Jaime Domínguez Abascal as its new president, replacing Antonio Colino, who has presided over the corporation since 2019. The new president took office as an academician of the RAI on November 27, 2001.

Domínguez Abascal holds a PhD in Industrial Engineering and has been a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Higher Technical School of Engineering of the University of Seville since 1980. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford and Sheffield Universities, at the Southwest Research Institute (San Antonio, Texas) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

He has participated in more than 150 publicly and privately funded R&D projects, most of them as principal investigator, all related to the analysis and design of mechanical systems or biomechanics. He has published approximately 250 articles, more than half of them international, supervised 24 doctoral theses, and holds 5 patents.

He also served as director of the Higher Technical School of Engineering of Seville between 2015 and 2019 and as its deputy director on two occasions (1981-83 and 1988-89). He was awarded the Antonio de Ulloa Andalusia Research Prize in 2010 and received the Silver Medal of the Spanish Society for Structural Integrity, of which he was also vice-president between 2003 and 2011.

In his professional life, the new president of the RAI has worked primarily in the dynamics and structural integrity of mechanical systems and in biomechanics. His work in dynamics focuses on the dynamics of mechanisms with flexible elements subjected to small and large deformations, their behavior under impact, and nonlinear vibrations. In structural integrity, he has worked mainly on fatigue and fracture of mechanical components, especially fatigue and crack growth under randomly varying loads, and crack growth originating in stress concentrators.