ProfessorRafael Palacios

Rafael (Rafa) Palacios is the Professor of Computational Aeroelasticity and Head of the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial, where he has been since 2007. He is aeronautical engineer from Universidad Politécnica, Madrid (1998) and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2005). Between both degrees, Rafa worked as R&D engineer in aeroelasticity and structural dynamics at Airbus (1998-2001). At Imperial he leads the Load Control and Aeroelastics lab, that investigates computational methods for dynamic analysis, control and optimization of flexible air vehicles and very large wind turbines. Between 2022 and 2026, Rafa was also the director of the Brahmal Vasudevan Institute for Sustainable Aviation, Imperial's flagship cross-disciplinary research centre in net-zero aviation technologies. Rafa is the lead author of Dynamics of Flexible Aircraft, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023, an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. He has been associate editor of the Journal of Aircraft (2016-2025), Journal of Fluids and Structures (2016-22) and Progress in Aerospace Sciences (2018-22).

For his doctoral research on Aeroelasticity of Smart Structures, he received the AIAA Foundation Orville and Wilbur Wright Graduate Award. At Michigan he was a Fulbright fellow and a Francois-Xavier Bagnoud fellow. In 2013, Rafa was voted best supervisor across Imperial at the Student Academic Choice Awards. He has also been a technical consultant to MSC Software in the development of the finite-element package Nastran, and to Facebook Inc and Airbus Defence & Space in the design of solar-powered aircraft. As a curious fact, his academic lineage can be traced back to German physicians from the 1700s!