Joaquim R. R. A. Martins is the Pauline M. Sherman Collegiate Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he heads the Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Laboratory.

His research ranges from developing new MDO techniques to applying those techniques to the design of aircraft and other engineering systems. He is a co-author of “Engineering Design Optimization”, a textbook published by Cambridge University Press.

Prof. Martins is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

Before joining the University of Michigan faculty in 2009, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, where from 2002 he held a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Multidisciplinary Optimization.

He received his undergraduate degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Imperial College, London, with a British Aerospace Award. He obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University, where he was awarded the Ballhaus prize for best thesis in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He has received the Best Paper Award in AIAA Conferences five times.

He was a member of the AIAA MDO Technical Committee (2006–2018) and was the technical co-chair for the 2008 AIAA Multidisciplinary Analysis and Optimization Conference.

He has served as Associate Editor for the AIAA Journal, Optimization and Engineering, and Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization. He is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of Aircraft.

He was elected as member of the Euorpean Academy of Engineering in 2022.