Professor Andrés Díaz Lantada (Madrid, June 5, 1981) is an Industrial Engineer (2005) and holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Manufacturing (2009) from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). His teaching and research work has been conducted at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of UPM, where he was appointed Assistant Professor in 2007, Associate Professor in 2011, Associate Professor (Civil Servant) in 2020, and Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering in 2025. He is a founding member of the Machines Engineering Research Group (2007) and the Educational Innovation Group for Innovative Machines Engineering Education (2006), which he has led since 2015. Since 2015, he has been the Director of the Product Development Laboratory at UPM, one of the pioneering laboratories in digital design and manufacturing worldwide, founded in 1997 by Professor Pilar Lafont (his mentor in the field of engineering) as a precursor to what would later be known as “FabLabs”. In 2025, he joined the IMDEA Materials Institute, maintaining his affiliation with UPM, to establish a research line in “Bioinspired, Smart, and Living Materials”.

His passion for mechanical engineering, medical applications, material science and technology, and educational innovation has enabled him to develop a research career at the intersection of engineering and life, as well as a teaching activity centered on active learning methodologies deployed in courses of UPM degrees such as the Bachelor\'s and Master\'s in Industrial Engineering, Bachelor\'s and Master\'s in Biomedical Engineering, Master\'s in Mechanical Engineering, Master\'s in Organizational Engineering, and Master\'s in Materials Engineering. He has been a visiting research professor at universities such as the Technical University of Vienna (Austria), Drexel University (USA), “Sapienza” University of Rome (Italy), University of Pisa (Italy), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), and University of Piura (Peru). He is an “International Excellence Fellow” at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, an institution with which he has collaborated since 2010 in the development of biomedical microsystems and the integration of multiscale design and manufacturing technologies. He has published over 130 scientific articles, seven full books in Spanish and English with translations into multiple languages, three of them with the prestigious Springer Nature publishing house on medical and materials technologies.

Research interests:
The career of Prof. Andrés Díaz Lantada has been focused on the research and development of mechanical engineering principles and techniques to transform healthcare technologies and the medical industry at all levels throughout the entire life cycle. At the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, he develops a basic research line on “mechanical science and technology for cellular-level interaction,” an applied research line on “medical devices based on smart materials,” and an innovation and technology transfer line oriented toward “methodologies and tools for the democratization of healthcare technologies.” All of these complement his educational activities in various academic programs.

Since 2015, when he began his work as director of the UPM Product Development Laboratory, he has led his university’s participation in research projects worth more than €12 million, directly managing over €2 million. Notably, he has served as the principal investigator for UPM in European projects such as TOMAX, UBORA, INKplant, and BIOMET4D. In 2020, he began collaborating with the IMDEA Materials Institute as the coordinator and UPM’s principal investigator in the synergic iMPLANTS-CM project, funded by the Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid, in partnership with Prof. Jon Molina as co-principal investigator from IMDEA. This project has enabled the additive manufacturing of smart alloys for radically innovative medical applications.

Recognizing the significance of materials science and technology in the development of products with special functionalities, Prof. Andrés Díaz Lantada has established the research line on “Bioinspired, Smart and Living Materials” at the IMDEA Materials Institute. Through bioinspiration and the use of advanced computational modeling and additive manufacturing technologies, he aims to create biomimetic medical technologies with optimized biomechanical and mechanobiological behavior. By processing active, multifunctional, or “smart” materials through additive technologies, he seeks to enhance the actuation and detection capabilities of medical devices. In the future, the incorporation of entities such as cells, bacteria, and archaea, leading to engineered living materials, will enable unprecedented functionalities.