Patricio F. Mendez

Biography

Biography Patricio F. Mendez is the inaugural Weldco/Industry Chair in Welding and Joining and the Director of the Canadian Centre for Welding and Joining. Mendez holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Materials Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a Mechanical Engineer degree from the University of Buenos Aires, in Argentina. He joined the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Alberta in January 2009. His areas of research and teaching focus on materials processes and their mathematical modeling including welding, casting, manufacturing, heat transfer, fluid flow, and phase transformations. Before joining CSM in 2004, he was a consulting engineer and expert witness for two years at Exponent Inc., with an emphasis on medical devices. In 1995 Mendez co-founded Semi-Solid Technologies Inc. in Cambridge, MA where he raised $1M for developing novel metal manufacturing technologies. He also co-invented an aluminum casting process that was licensed to manufacture OEM engine parts for the Ford Focus between the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Research Interest

Research Areas: Advanced welding and joining processes; modeling of multicoupled, multiphysics materials processes; semi-solid metals processing; scaling and similarity methods.