Dr. Ruiz is a member of the Optical Engineering Group at the Wolfson School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, which was awarded the Queen's Anniversary prize for applying modern optics and laser technologies to solve engineering problems in 2000. He is also a member of the Scientific and Technical Committee (SATCO) of the British Society for Strain Measurements (BSSM), the Institute of Physics (IoP) and the Optical Society of America (OSA).

Dr. Ruiz has a broad interest in optical methods with applications in mechanical engineering and materials science, including optical coherence tomography, digital correlation methods, interferometry, depth-resolved metrology and profilometry, and inverse methods for material properties identification.

Within the STAPP project, he supervises a PhD student to: 1) develop a non-destructive test to measure moisture concentration within PV panels using spectroscopic optical coherence tomography; and 2) Construct an instrument to measure the hygroscopic expansion coefficient of EVA, based on wavelength scanning interferometry. These results will be used as an input into the multi-physics model developed by the group at Nottingham University, to predict mechanical failure of PV modules.