Octavio Andrés González Estrada joined in 2014 the School of Mechanical Engineering at Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS) as a lecturer and the research group GIEMA. He is an Associate Member of the Legato Team. His previous experience includes a Postdoctoral Research Associate position in the Theoretical, Applied and Computational Mechanics team at Cardiff University, 2010-2014. He was part of the research group lead by Prof. Stéphane Bordas working on the EPSRC project: 'Increased Reliability for Industrially Relevant Automatic Crack Growth Simulation with the eXtended Finite Element Method'. From 2003 to 2010 he was working in the Research Centre for Vehicle Technology (CITV) at Universitat Politècnica de València as a Research Associate and Research Assistant. He received his PhD in Mechanical and Materials Engineering (2010) and MSc in Mechanical and Materials Engineering (2008) from Universitat Politècnica de València, and his Bachelor in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering from Universidad Autónoma de Manizales, Colombia, in 2001 with First Class Honours.

His area of expertise and research directions include Computational Solid Mechanics and Numerical Methods, with an emphasis in Fracture Mechanics, structural reliability, damage tolerant analysis, evolving discontinuities, partition of unity methods, the Extended Finite Element Method and Level Set Method, accuracy and convergence of the solution in FEM/XFEM approximations, error estimation and error bounding for FEM/XFEM.