I am currently a doctoral candidate at the Geo-Energy Lab of EPFL. I have wide interests ranging from the mechanics of friction and fracture in geomaterials to the physics of earthquakes and faulting. During my PhD, I'm focused on understanding coupled hydro-mechanical processes in faults and fractured rocks. Generally, I use tools of theoretical and computational mechanics to understand the interplay between different physical processes involved in both natural and human-induced phenomena. An important part of my research is to link both theoretical and numerical predictions to field observations.

I obtained my master in earthquake engineering and my civil engineer title at the University of Chile in the year 2014. Prior to joining EPFL in 2019, I worked in the mining industry in Chile and I also travelled around the world for two years.

I worked recently on understanding the mechanics of fluid-driven stable frictional ruptures. We found self-similar and non-self-similar solutions for fluid-assisted fault slip, and provide new analytical and numerical descriptions of them in 3-D media. Fluid-driven stable (aseismic) ruptures play an important role in a number of industrial applications (e.g., deep geothermal energy, CO2 geological storage) and natural phenomena (e.g., fluid-driven seismic swarms and aftershocks). Find the link to our preprint below.

Currently, I'm investigating post-injection fault slip, the relation between the moment release associated with fluid injections and operational parameters, and looking at problems in which fluid flow leads to unstable fault slip.