Dr. FRANCISCO C. DE ARAÚJO received his B.S.C.E. degree from the Federal Univ. Piauí (UFPI, Brazil) in 1986, the M.S.C.E. degree from the Federal Univ. Rio de Janeiro (COPPE/UFRJ, Brazil) in 1989, and the Ph.D. degree (Dr.-Ing.) in Civil Engineering from the T.U. Braunschweig (TUBS, Germany) in 1994. He is currently Full Professor of Civil Engineering at Federal Univ. Ouro Preto (UFOP, Brazil) and has been appointed as Distinguished Visiting Scientist from 2006-2007 at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL, U.S. Department of Energy). His research interests concern Structural Dynamics, Wave Propagation Problems, Composites, Reinforced Concrete Structures, Soil-Structure Interaction, Finite Element Method (FEM), Boundary Element Method (BEM), Iterative Solvers and Parallel Computing.