Valentina Zega received the Ph.D. degree cum laude in structural, seismic, and geotechnical engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 2017. She is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano. She has coauthored around 50 papers in international journals and 9 patents. Her current research interests include the mechanical design and optimization of innovative Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and metamaterials and the numerical modeling of their linear and nonlinear dynamic response.
Since 2019, she has been a Technical Program Committee Member of the IEEE MEMS Conference, the IEEE EFTF-IFCS Conference, and the IEEE INERTIAL Conference.
In 2018, she received the Arnarlo Rancati award from Istituto Lombardo, Accademia di Scienze e Lettere, Milano, for an unpublished work to the advantage of the aeronautics and technical industry in general. In 2023, the Licensing Executives Society (LES) Italy and Politecnico di Milano cited Valentina Zega as one of the women of Italian excellence that with their fundamental role in driving innovation, creativity, business growth, sustainable development and pursuing and protecting the IP values improve the quality of life for all of us. In 2024 she received the AIMETA junior award 2024 – Mechanics of Materials and Structures, a recognition of a significant scientific result obtained in the field of Mechanics of Materials and Structures. In 2024 she also received the IEEE Sensors Council Technical Achievement Award in the area of Sensors (early career). The award honors a person with outstanding technical contributions within the scope of the IEEE Sensors Council, as documented by publications and patents.
She is the local coordinator and WP3 leader of the HORIZON-MSCA-2022-DN-01-01 — MSCA Doctoral Networks 2022 project METRAMAT (https://metramat.eu/) and scientific coordinator of other research projects in collaboration with industries.