C. Armando Duarte is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining the UIUC, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a visiting professor in the Department of Structural Engineering at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has five years of industrial experience and has made fundamental and sustained contributions to the fields of computational mechanics and methods, in particular to development of Meshfree, Partition of Unity, and Generalized/eXtended Finite Element Methods. He proposed the first partition of unity method to solve fracture problems and pioneered the use of asymptotic solutions of elasticity equations of cracks as enrichment functions for this class of methods. His group has developed a 3D GFEM for the simulation of hydraulic fracture propagation, interaction, and coalescence, and he has published more than 95 scientific articles and book chapters, and also coedited 2 books on computational methods. He has papers featured on the ScienceDirect top 25 Hottest Articles of Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering and Engineering Fracture Mechanics.