Marco Salviato named inaugural Varanasi Endowed Faculty Fellow in structures and composites

Usha and Rao Varanasi’s new faculty fellowship names Professor Salviato as the first recipient.

Composite materials are transforming aerospace by dramatically reducing weight while maintaining strength, but we still don't fully understand how they fail. Professor Marco Salviato, the inaugural recipient of the new S. Rao & Usha Varanasi Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Aeronautics & Astronautics, is working to close this knowledge gap. In addition to being a member of our department’s faculty, Professor Salviato is the Director of the UW Advanced Composites Center and the FAA AMTAS Center.

The Fellowship, established by Rao (Ph.D. '68) and Usha Varanasi (Ph.D. Chemistry '68), provides five years of dedicated support for faculty research in structures and composites, the field where Rao built his distinguished aerospace career. After creating a graduate student fellowship several years ago, the Varanasis expanded their commitment to A&A with this faculty endowment.

Composites offer tantalizing advantages: they're significantly lighter than traditional materials, resist corrosion, and can be tailored for specific performance needs. But they also behave unpredictably under stress, conduct electricity differently than metals, and fail in ways we're still learning to predict. These uncertainties limit their widespread adoption in critical aerospace structures.

"This support allows me to expand our investigations into the nonlinear behavior of advanced composites, an area with direct implications for the next generation of lightweight, resilient aerospace systems," Salviato explains. His research sits at the intersection of materials science, structural mechanics and computational modeling, where his team works to predict when and how these materials might fail.

The Fellowship provides resources to benchmark new structural concepts, integrate experimental data with predictive models, and explore design strategies that address composites' unique properties. Salviato's students will gain hands-on experience with advanced testing methods while working on research that directly influences how aerospace structures are designed and certified.

"They'll see how fundamental research translates into real-world aerospace applications," he notes. "This experience will not only strengthen their technical expertise but also cultivate the creativity and confidence needed to become leaders in the field."

"As the aerospace industry pushes toward more efficient, sustainable designs, understanding composites becomes increasingly urgent," says A&A Interim Chair Mehran Mesbahi. "The Varanasi Fellowship gives Marco the resources he needs to address critical questions about how we design and trust these structures to carry people and payloads into challenging environments.”