I met Stephane Bordas and his team during my research visit to Cardiff University in 2011. During my stay I incorporated the ability to handle NURBS to a 2D Cartesian grid Finite Element code. This work was part of my Master's Thesis. Now I am a PhD student at Universitat Politècnica de València under the supervision of Prof. Juan José Ródenas and Manuel Tur. My research interests focus in the field of Computational Mechanics, more specifically on the following areas:

• Exact representation of FE models in a Cartesian grid environment using NURBS and T-spline.
• Efficient imposition of boundary conditions in non-conforming meshes.
• Automatic and robust h-refined mesh generation.
• Development of efficient and accurate shape optimization algorithms using a Cartesian grid FEM.

In addition, to my research stay in Cardiff I had the chance to visit the Computational Biomodeling Lab. under the supervision of Yongjie (Jessica) Zhang. The outcome of this visit was the implementation of T-splines in my Cartesian grid code and a experience regarding the mesh generation problem.