Daniel Oropeza

background

I was born in Germany and grew up in Mexico, Germany, and the United States. I earned a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin in 2012, an M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 2014, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021. During my undergraduate years, I completed internships at Boeing in Houston, TX and Everett, WA, as well as MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, MA. I worked in industry as a research engineer for Lockheed Martin's NEXT Team in Bethesda, MD from 2014-2016. After the Ph.D., I was a postdoctoral fellow with the Materials and Manufacturing Technology Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, before moving to UCSB in 2023.

Research

The goal of the MMAX lab is to tackle grand challenges in materials and manufacturing to meet the demands of application areas in hypersonics, directed energy, unmanned aerial vehicles, vehicle propulsion, sustainable energy generation, tailored healthcare, and planetary robotics. My central research interests and goals lie in developing materials and manufacturing technologies, while mapping correlations between process parameters, material microstructure, and component properties, to enable the next generation platforms. In particular, the advent of advanced manufacturing processes present a new paradigm to generate complex engineered structures with tailored microstructures. A rigorous understanding of the relations between process parameters, microstructure, structural mechanics, and functional properties is critical for application to the field. Towards these goals, I nurture a closed-loop research methodology integrating my expertise in machine/equipment design, advanced material synthesis and characterization, and manufacturing process fundamentals, which allow the MMAX lab to tackle grand challenges in both industry and fundamental science.

Education

• 2016-2021 - Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 2012-2014 - M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University
• 2008-2012 - B.S. in Aerospace Engineering , The University of Texas at Austin