Hi, I am Homero Valladares from Ecuador. In 2015, I was granted a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue the Master’s program in Mechanical Engineering (ME) offered by Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). In August 2017, I joined the cooperative Ph.D. program in ME between Purdue University and IUPUI. During my graduate studies, I have been working on structural optimization using traditional optimization methods, topology optimization, and Bayesian optimization. I have experience using the finite element analysis code LS-DYNA and MATLAB. This Fall 2019, I hope to expand my knowledge about composite materials. Future projects I will be working on are multi-scale optimization for composite materials and the use of machine learning for structural optimization.