Michelle L. Pantoya is an American mechanical engineer who studies combustion of solid fuels, such as nanocomposites of thermite.
[1] Pantoya was a student at the University of California, Davis, where she earned a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering in 1992.
After a summer internship at the Combustion Research Facility of the Sandia National Laboratory, she shifted her interests to mechanical engineering, continuing at Davis to earn a master's degree in 1994 and complete her Ph.D. in 1999.
[3] Her dissertation, Decomposition behaviors of energetic materials immersed in molten salt, was supervised by Benjamin Shaw.
[4] She was a part-time faculty member at California State University, Sacramento before joining Texas Tech as an assistant professor in 2000.