He joined RIT in 2006 and previously taught and was a research assistant at Texas A&M. He also worked in industry as a rotating machinery senior engineer at PDVSA in Venezuela. Villasmil's research interests focus on computational fluid dynamics, turbulence modeling; rotor dynamics and turbomachinery and components design; industrial power generation and refrigeration; heat transfer and fluid power. He is also interested in conventional and alternative energy technologies, engineering education as well as ethics in engineering. Villasmil's work has been published and he has presented at numerous conferences including: