Research News

David Conesa defended his thesis “Empirical and Structural Mathematical Models for Biological Systems: Case Studies in COVID-19 and Cardiac Dynamics” in the EPSEB in Campus Sud on the 18th of December. Under the supervision of Dr. Enric Alvarez Lacalle, the thesis develops different empirical, predictive, and mechanistic mathematical models to study and analyze two branches of biology: epidemiology in the context of a pandemic such as COVID-19, and cardiac dynamics.

In a joint project between the research groups GCM (Department of Physics) and NEMEN (Department of Chemical Engineering), PhD student Maahin Mirzay Shahim, from South Azerbaijan, Iran, has developed new catalytic materials by combining glassy alloys and cerium oxide in her PhD defended on December 16 and directed by Eloi Pineda and Lluis Soler

Benet Eiximeno Franch defended his thesis co-directed by Oriol Lehmkuhl Barba and Ivette Maria Rodríguez Pérez on October 31, 2025 at Campus Nor. The thesis is titled "High performance computing and artificial intelligence for dimensionality reduction of turbulent flows" and investigates how large-scale artificial intelligence can help compress aerodynamic simulation data to better understand chaotic turbulence phenomena

A study by researchers Juan Sánchez-Baena, Ferran Mazzanti and Jordi Boronat, from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, together with researcher Raúl Bombı́n, from the University of Bordeaux, shows for the first time the creation and destruction of a quantum supersolid by heating a dipolar system, initially in a superfluid phase without spatial order. The work illustrates the connection between the counterintuitive appearance of a solid by heating, exclusive to the quantum realm, and the expected phenomenology of fusion when the temperature is raised

The 4MOST telescope, at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, has obtained first light. An international scientific team, led by Alberto Rebassa, a researcher at the UPC and member of the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), and Odette Toloza, a researcher at the Federico Santa María Technical University (USM) in Chile, will observe and analyze the spectra of 77,000 binary stars

Professor Javier Argüello Luengo of the UPC Physics Department, along with Professor Alejandro González Tudela, a researcher at the CSIC's Institute of Fundamental Physics, are publishing this book, which is the result of the RSEF-BBVA Foundation award for the best popular science article on the same topic.

Jaume Ojer Ferrer defended his thesis co-supervised by Romualdo Pastor Satorras and Michele Starnini on July 30 at Campus Nord. Entitled "The Effect of Social Interactions on Collective Behavior: From Flocking to Opinion Polarization", the thesis explores how social interactions between individuals give rise to different types of collective behavior that are observed in nature and society, in particular the dynamics of flocking in animals and the polarization of opinions in humans