Ramiro Mantecón is a Doctoral Fullbright Scholar at San Diego State University's Experimental Mechanics Laboratory

Ramiro Mantecón Padín is a doctoral Fulbright scholar at San Diego State University’s Experimental Mechanics Laboratory for the 2022-23 academic year. Ramiro’s research revolves around novel biomedical engineering applications. Since 2019, he has been working with the Mechanical Engineering Department at University Carlos III in Madrid, Spain, exploring recent advances in additive manufacturing for biomechanical applications. Ramiro attained a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering in 2019 and a Master’s degree in Information and Health Engineering in 2020 before starting his doctoral studies. During his pre-doctoral studies, he joined Dr. Henar Miguélez’s research team, where he worked on the monitoring of the additive manufacturing process using thermal imaging and correlating the thermal evolution with the resulting mechanical properties. The underlying goal of this research was additively manufacturing human bone implants. Ramiro continued working under Dr. Miguélez as he began his doctoral studies in Mechanical Engineering, where he continued to explore additive manufacturing to develop human tissue replicas. In the spring of 2022, he was awarded one of the seven Fulbright scholarships given by the US-Spain program to develop a research stay in an American institution during doctoral studies. Although the stages prior to traveling are an important part of the experience, his Fulbright journey started in October 2022 as he joined San Diego State University as a Visiting Research Scholar. Thus began the in-person phase of his work with Dr. George Youssef in the Experimental Mechanics Laboratory, where they aim to instrumentalize and calibrate the head surrogate for its ulterior use to test impact mitigating systems.