(1959- ) President 2015-2021 Torroja Medalist 2022
Professor Sergio Pellegrino, elected IASS President in 2015, has been a member of the Association since 1990 and of the Executive Council since 2004. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the IASS from 2008 to 2016, as chair of the IASS-IUTAM Symposium on Deployable Structures in Cambridge (UK) in 1998, and as Scientific Committee co-chair for the IASS-IABSE London Symposium in 2011.
He is the Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Civil Engineering at California Institute of Technology, and a Senior Research Scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His general area of research is the mechanics of lightweight structures, with a focus on packaging, deployment, shape control and stability. He is currently working on novel concepts for future space telescopes and spacecraft antennas, and on ultralight structures for space-based solar power satellites. As a member of the NASA Superpressure Balloon design team for over 10 years, he has been involved in the development of up to 100 m diameter stratospheric balloons, which have been flown over Antarctica, New Zealand, Sweden, etc. He has authored over 250 publications.