Prof. Carlos Portela

Carlos M. Portela is the d’Arbeloff Career Development Professor in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Prof. Portela received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, where he was given the Centennial Award for the best thesis in Mechanical and Civil Engineering, and he received degrees in Aerospace Engineering (B.S.) and Physics (B.A.) from the University of Southern California. At Caltech he worked under the guidance of Profs. Julia R. Greer and Dennis M. Kochmann exploring the mechanical response of 3D architected materials from experimental and computational perspectives. He joined MIT in August of 2020.

Prof. Portela's research seeks to utilize 3D architecture in materials to address current societal and engineering challenges. It aims to increase understanding of materials across length and time scales, from nanometers to centimeters and from quasi-statics to extreme dynamics, respectively, and strives to design, fabricate, model, and test all the research group's materials in an in-house loop whenever possible.