Francisco Zárate is an Associate Research Professor at CIMNE, and Associated Lecturer at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) , where he teaches Strength of Materials and Structural Analysis undergraduate courses (1997-present) and several courses at the master degree (1999-present).

He is the head of the online version of the Master on Numerical Methods in Engineering of the UPC.

Civil Engineer by the University of Guanajuato, México (1986), and the Technical University of Catalonia  (2004);  M.Sc.in Numerical Methods (1991) and PhD in Structural Analysis (1996) by the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC).

He has been involved in several national and European competitive projects and several private consultancies in the field of computational mechanics. He is an expert in plate and shells problems, discrete elements and stochastic analysis.

Board Member of the Mexican Society in Numerical Methods in Engineering, he also is author of many educational materials and programs like MAT-fem (http://www.cimne.com/mat-fem/).