Graduated from the Politecnico di Milano, Prof. Laura Vergani began working as a researcher at the Department of Mechanics in 1983. In 1998, she was appointed as an associate professor, and in 2001 as a full professor, still within the Faculty of Industrial Engineering. For several years, her teaching activities have been conducted in the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Engineering and Nanotechnologies programs.
She is the author of over 280 scientific publications, 1 book, and co-author of 6 books.
From 2010 to 2016, she served as the president of the Italian Association for Stress Analysis (AIAS) and the Italian Society of Mechanical Design and Machine Construction, and from 2013 to 2019, she was a member of the board of the Alta Scuola Politecnica.
Her main research interests include: multi-scale mechanical behavior and characterization of biological materials, damage mechanisms of natural materials, with particular focus on bones, design and experimental characterization of bio-inspired materials, multi-scale numerical modeling and analysis of complex structures, damage phenomena in composite materials, the behavior of steels in the presence of hydrogen, and mechanisms of embrittlement.
These research interests have materialized in the coordination of the European project EIC Pathfinder Challenges 2023 PANTAREI, aimed at generating bio-inspired panels from waste materials with zero energy impact, and the GAP MSCA Doctoral Network 2022 project, whose main goal is to define a new predictive parameter for bone fragility and new constructs for the treatment of fractures.
Additionally, she coordinates the PRIN ARCHIMEDES (2022) and Polisocial PRESTO (2022) projects, both focused on the study of bone fragility.