Francisco is a Mechanical Engineer (Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral, Ecuador, 1998) and has a PhD in Mining Engineering (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 2004). He is currently Project Director in Principia.
Since joining Principia in 1999, he has participated in a large variety of projects, mainly related to the dynamic analysis of structures: impact, metal forming, collapse, etc. He was particularly active in the aerospace sector and accumulated considerable experience analyzing composite parts under static and dynamic loads, with emphasis on bird impacts and other fast transients.
In fluid mechanics, Dr. RIERA has carried out many projects on the dispersion of effluents in water bodies, and participated in other projects, like the simulations of the extraction of fuel from the Prestige tanker.
Rocío has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from ICAI (Universidad Pontificia Comillas, Madrid, 1998), where she was Associate Professor of Elasticity and Strength of Materials for three years (1999-2002).
She moved to Principia in 2007, where she was given overall responsibility for managing Principia´s business area related with Dassault Systèmes Solutions, which Principia represents in Spain and Portugal since the late eighties, and which nowadays spans the CAD, CAE, CAM and PLM domains.
Rocío initiated her professional career specializing in the numerical simulation of the complex structural problems faced by her clients. She was active in many industrial sectors, with contributions especially noteworthy in the automotive area (impact analyses, global or partial models of the structure of various vehicles, etc) and the aerospace sector (simulation of the behavior of different aircraft structures, development of methodologies for verification of FE models, etc.).