ECCOMAS AWARD FOR THE BEST Ph.D THESES OF 2017 ON COMPUTATIONAL METHODS IN APPLIED SCIENCES AND ENGINEERING
The meeting of the Evaluation Committee for the ECCOMAS award for the best PhD theses 2017 was held on April 6th, 2018 at CIMNE, Barcelona. As an answer to the call for tender, the ECCOMAS member associations nominated 17 theses (one of them nominated by two associations). The Evaluation Committee was composed by Nils-Erik Wiberg (chairman), Stefanie Reese, Wulf Dettmer, Boniface Nkonga, and Pedro Díez (secretary).
After a detailed discussion, a voting process was held in two phases. First, after a secret voting the number of theses was reduced from 17 to 8. In a second round, the number was reduced to 4 theses that were ranked well above the rest. Then the committee discussed the merits of these 4 theses, evaluating the different aspects of each and unanimously agreed on selecting among them two winners.
The two winners are:
- Dr. Silvia Budday (Germany) for the thesis “The role of Mechanics during Brain development”
- Dr. Matthias Faes (Belgium) for the thesis “Interval methods for the identification and quantification of inhomogeneous uncertainty in Finite Element models”.
These theses are outstanding works in Computational Methods in Applied Sciences combining excellent knowledge of both theory and practice, with special insight in the fundamental and computational aspects. Both, the two winners are pieces of research that extend the frontiers of the fields of ECCOMAS, and open our community to new problems and methodologies. The award decision was based on the relevance of the topics, the originality of the theses, their scientific content and the innovative numerical developments. Moreover, both theses are very well written and meticulously presented.
The list of finalists selected by the local-regional ECCOMAS Association is the following:
| Author | Title of the theses | Local Association | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nikolao T. Chamacos | Design of micro- and nano-structured surfaces with tunable wettability | GRACM | Greece |
| Mariana de Campos Madeira Simão | Fluid-structure interaction in pressurized systems | APMTAC | Portugal |
| Francesco Fambri | Discontinuous Galerkin methods for compressible and incompressible flows on space-time adaptive meshes | GIMC/AIMETA | Italy |
| Alex Gansen | Multiscale modelling of anisotropic composite media for EMC applications | UKACM | UK |
| Gregor Gantner | Optimal adaptivity for splines in finite and boundary element methods | GAMM | Germany |
| Liang Meng | Reduced Shape-space Approach to Material Characterization – instrumented Indentation Test Case | CSMA | France |
| Adrian Moure | Phase-field modelling and isogeometric analysis of cell crawling | SEMA / SEMNI | Spain |
| Josef B Nagel | Bayesian techniques for inverse uncertainty quantification | SWICCOMAS | Switzerland |
| Robert Nagy | Towards a novel method for estimating rupture risk | CEACM | Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, The Czech Republic |
| Dalibor Nikolic | Computer Modeling and optimization of stent design | SSCM | Serbia |
| Valentin Resseguier | Mixing and fluids Dynamics under location uncertainty | GAMNI/SMAI | France |
| Lorenzo Siconolfi | Stability and senssivity analysis for flow control | SIMAI | Italy |
| Vamsi Spandan | Bubbles and drops in turbulent Taylor-Couette flow: numerical modelling and simulations | NMC | Netherlands |
| Erik Svenning | Multiscale modeling of ductile fracture in solids | NOACM | Norway |
| Balbina Wcisło | Large Strain thermomechanical material models accountin for inelasticity,instabilities and gradient enhancement | PACM | Poland |