ECCOMAS AWARD FOR THE BEST Ph.D THESES OF 2011 ON COMPUTATIONAL METHODS IN APPLIED SCIENCES AND ENGINEERING

The meeting of the Evaluation Committee for the ECCOMAS award for the best PhD Theses 2011 was held on March 9th, 2012 at CIMNE, Barcelona. As a response to the call for tender, the ECCOMAS Member Associations nominated 13 Theses. The Evaluation Committee was composed by Nils-Erik Wiberg (chairman), Ferdinando Auricchio, Robert Schaefer, Jose Pereira 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 13 to 7. In a second round, the number was reduced to 4 that ranked well above the rest. Then the Committee ranked the 4 theses evaluating the different aspects of each and unanimously agreed on selecting 2 out of these 4 Theses as the winners.

The two winners are:

  • Dr. Max Duarte (France) for the thesis “Adaptive numerical methods for the simulation of time-space multi-scale reacting fronts
  • Dr. Lena Wiechert [now Yoshihara] (Germany) for the thesis “Computational Modeling of Multi-Field and Multi-Scale Phenomena in Respiratory Mechanics

These theses are outstanding works in Computational Methods combining excellent knowledge of both theory and practice.

All nominees will be invited to participate at the second PhD Olympiad to be held in Aveiro, Portugal, in conjunction with the 1st Young Investigators Conference (YIC2012)of ECCOMAS, from 25-26 April, 2012.

The list of finalists selected by the local-regional ECCOMAS Association is the following:

Author Title of the Thesis Association Country
Nick G. Babouskos Analysis  and  optimization  of  elastic  and  viscoelastic plates  using  the  boundary  element  method GRACM Greece
Joan Baiges The fixed-mesh ALE method applied to multi-physics problems using stabilized formulations SEMNI Spain
Pedro Manuel Cardoso Teixeira Ductile Damage Prediction in Sheet Metal Forming and Experimental Validation APMTAC Portugal
Max Duarte Adaptive numerical methods for the simulation of time-space multi-scale reacting fronts SMAI-GAMNI France
Johannes Eitelberger A multiscale material description for wood below the fiber saturation point with particular emphasis on wood-water interactions CEACM Central Europe
Richard J.A.M. Stevens Rayleigh-Bénard turbulence NMC The Netherlands
Esben Lindgaard Buckling Optimization of Composite Structures NoACM Northern Europe
Juan Antonio López García High order well-balanced numerical methods for non-conservatives hyperbolic systems. Applications to shallow water models SEMA Spain
Paolo Pintus Design of silicon based integrated optical devices using the finite element method SIMAI Italy
Lev Podshivalov 3D hierarchical geometric modeling and multiscale FE analysis as a base for individualized medical diagnosis of bone structure IACMM Israel
Arkadiusz Ryfa Application of the inverse analysis for the heat transfer coefficient retrieval for the impingement heat transfer PACM Poland
Vladislav Yastrebov Computational contact mechanics: geometry, detection and numerical techniques CSMA France
Lena Yoshihara Computational Modeling of Multi-Field and Multi-Scale Phenomena in Respiratory Mechanics GACM Germany