Professor Conor McCarthy is Chair (Full Professor) of Lightweight Structures at the University of Limerick in the Republic of Ireland, where he leads a research group focused on developing digital twins for advanced joining processes, such as autonomous robotic drilling and ultrasonic welding of high-performance composite materials and structures. A key driver of his research is to optimise advanced lightweight structures by developing and deploying novel multi-material joining technologies. Some examples of this research work include the development of joints for advanced composite fuselage and wing skin-stinger and -frame bolted joints, and novel interlocked hybrid composite–metal joints. This research work has led to over 150 Scopus-Indexed high impact publications (>4,050 citations, H-index: 43) and a US patent on a new smart glue that can be “unzipped” using only high-frequency radio waves for applications in product disassembly and circularity. Professor McCarthy has graduated 15 PhD students and mentored 25 postdoctoral researchers, including 16 Marie-Sklodowska Curie fellows. He has also been the principal investigator on successful research projects worth over €100M. He serves on the Board of a leading composites Journal Composite Structures. Prof. McCarthy is the founding director of the Confirm - Smart Manufacturing, a multi-institutional research center funded by Science Foundation Ireland and Industry, where he led the development of a world-class smart manufacturing research facility, acquired over €50M in competitively won research funding from industry and the European Commission, and grew the center from 40 to 200 researchers in 4 years, resulting in 550+ high quality journal publications with a field weighted citation impact score of 2.1.