Prof. McCarthy's main area of research is in joining lightweight materials, mostly for high performance structural applications, where he has published over 120 papers and four book chapters. He currently leads a large research group looking at novel joining methods (see www.falcom.ie). Prof. McCarthy is a Science Foundation Ireland Principle Investigator and leads major research programmes in Engineering Science. His interests include bolted, bonded and thermally joined composites, multi-scale damage mechanics and non-linear finite element analysis.