Gabriele Dessena

Gabriele Dessena Meng PhD ARAeS is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), where he has been since September 2023. Previously, he was an Airworthiness Inspector at ENAC, the Italian Civil Aviation Authority. He obtained an MEng – single-cycle Master’s degree in Engineering – in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Southampton (UK) in 2019 and a PhD in Aerospace from Cranfield University (UK) in 2023. His doctoral research, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC – public research funding body in the UK), focused on nonlinear model reduction for flexible structures, covering system identification, experimental vibration testing, and finite element model updating. During his doctoral studies, he collaborated with Politecnico di Torino (Italy) on the development of robust modal analysis techniques.

His research focuses on structural dynamics, particularly in aeronautical and aerospace applications, including structural health monitoring, modal identification, nonlinearity detection, and surrogate-based optimisation. Additionally, his methods have also been applied to civil engineering, particularly in reinforced concrete structures, such as tall buildings, for modal response estimation. He is currently the Principal Investigator of TOMA (Tangential Interpolation for Operational Modal Analysis), funded by UC3M, and the co-PI of a Madrid regional government (Comunidad de Madrid) funded project on AI-based combustion gas analysis.

Gabriele actively contributes to the scientific community as a reviewer for major journals and organiser of special sessions at international conferences, such as at IOMAC 2025. He is a member of the Royal Aeronautical Society (Affiliate), the Italian Association of Aeronautics and Astronautics (A.I.D.A.A.), and is a fully chartered industrial engineer in Italy (Section A – Part B) within the Association of Engineers of the Province of Sassari. Furthermore, since 2025, he has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol, UK), working on output-only modal analysis and nonlinear identification methods for aerospace structures.