Biography

Brendan O’Toole is a UNLV College of Engineering professor who specializes in composites, manufacturing, mechanical testing, and design.

He has led student projects including Hailey's Hand, through which undergraduates and graduate students built a series of 3D-printed prosthetic robotic hands for a local child; the performance of quality control tests on components of NASA’s Orion deep-space capsule, which is designed to travel on the Artemis missions to the moon and, eventually, to Mars; and a challenge to build the world's largest flying disc. He was also instrumental in a UNLV partnership with the Desert Research Institute, the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) and Tesla on a summer boot camp aimed at coaching Nevada teachers to become more confident in coaching robotics programs.

O'Toole is the faculty advisor to the student section of the Society of Automotive Engineers and has mentored many American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and Society for Automotive Engineering (SAE) student design competition teams. He also serves as the program manager of the Soldier’s Objective Future Force Electronics Reliability and Survivability (SOldier FERST), a program dedicated to protecting military personnel by improving vehicle designs that can withstand roadside blasts.

Prior to joining UNLV, O'Toole was a research assistant at the University of Delaware, researching new materials and processes for making curved beams in aircraft structures. O'Toole's research interests have focused on a broad range of experimental material characterization and computational simulation of advanced materials subject to extreme loading conditions.