The Generalitat de Catalunya has awarded the Narcís Monturiol Medal for scientific and technological merit to Xavier Oliver, professor of our School. The ceremony took place on January 25, in the Palau de la Generalitat Auditorium.
This award, instituted by the Generalitat in 1982, distinguishes people and entities for their outstanding contribution to the development of science and technology in Catalonia, and honors the renowned Catalan inventor and politician of the 19th century, Narcís Monturiol Estarriol (1819-1885).
Xavier Oliver i Olivella is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering linked to Barcelona School of Civil Engineering and researcher at the International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE). After studying Civil Engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and a period of professional activity as an engineer, he began his academic activity at the UPC in 1982 as a researcher, and, since 1985, as a professor. With a PhD in Civil Engineering at the UPC, he has done research sabbaticals at the universities of Stanford and Boulder University of Colorado, in the United States.
On the research side, he has focused on the study of the field of design and computational analysis of materials and meta-materials (materials with exotic properties) at the CIMNE, where he has been a researcher since 1987. In 2012, The European Research Council (ERC) granted him one of the ERC’s Advanced Grants, which he developed in the period 2013-2017, in addition to two ERC’s Proof of Concept Grants, in the period 2018-2021. Among other awards, he has received the Gauss-Newton Medal 2021 from the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM) for his scientific career and the diversity and continuity of his contributions to computational mechanics. He has been president of the Spanish Society of Computational Mechanics and Computational Engineering (SEMNI) in the period 2009-2017. Furthermore, he has published some 120 articles in international journals.
Please visit the UPC News Room to read the complete piece: https://www.upc.edu/ca/sala-de-premsa/noticies/medalla-narcis-monturiol-per-als-professors-xavier-oliver-i-trinitat-pradell (available only in Spanish and Catalan)