Irene Fernandez Villegas graduated as an Aerospace Engineer at the Poly-Technical University of Madrid (UPM). In 2005 she got a PhD degree by the same University on Resistance Welding of Thermoplastic Composites. She has more than 15 years of research experience on processing and welding of thermoplastic composites, first at the National Institute of Aerospace Engineering in Madrid and currently at the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, where she works as an Associate Professor.

In the last 12 years the efforts of the research team led by Dr. Fernandez Villegas at TU Delft have been strongly focused on understanding and developing ultrasonic welding of composite structures. Apart from her work on the development of welding technologies, Dr. Fernandez Villegas is highly interested in exploring how to make use of these and other new technologies to design sustainable aircraft structures.