Research News

Eduardo Moreno Ramos defends his thesis supervised by Sergio Alonso at the Computational biology and Complex System research group on May 30 at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. The thesis, entitled "Computer modeling of the polarity and amoeboid motion of living cells", employs an additional phase field model to couple the biochemical reactions inside the cell with membrane deformations.

Chen Gao defends his thesis co-supervised by Josep J. Masdemont (UPC), Gerard Gómez (UB), Jianping Yuan (NPU) on May 18 at the South Youyi Campus, School of Astronautics of North Western Polytechnical University, China . The thesis, entitled "Dynamics and control for continuous low-thrust spacecraft near collinear libration points", studies the dynamics and control of artificial satellites in collinear libration environments considering weak thrust

A research team led by the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and of which Glòria Sala, a researcher at the UPC Astronomy and Astrophysics Group and the Institute for Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), is a member, has been able to observe, for the first time, an explosion of X-ray light. The study is featured on the cover of the journal Nature.

En Roger Ayats defended his thesis co-directed by l’Alvaro Meseguer and Fernando Mellibovsky on April 22nd at Campus Nord. The thesis, which is entitled "Exact coherent structures in the transitional regime of shear and centrifugal flows", studies the transition mechanisms in shear and centrifugal flows by computing and analysing the role of exact coherent structures.

Qi Liu telematically defended his thesis supervised by Professor Manuel Hernández-Pajares on April 14, 2022, entitled "GNSS-based Global Ionospheric Maps: real-time combination, time resolution and applications on space weather monitoring”. The thesis focuses on GIMs including the combination of Global Ionospheric Maps (GIMs) from different centers in real-time, evaluation of real-time GIMs, investigation of the impact of temporal resolution on GIMs, and applications of GIMs on new indices about spatial-temporal components of the VTEC gradient as well as ionospheric storm-scale.

Xavier Navarro Bosque defended his thesis co-directed by Raül Rodríguez Solà and M. Carmen Casas Castillo on March 17 at the Vilanova i la Geltrú Campus. Titled "Spatial and temporal organization of rain in the metropolitan area of Barcelona", the thesis presents a complete study on rain in the city of Barcelona that includes the updating of its intensity-duration-frequency curves and the its areal reduction factors, the kinematic monitoring of storms over the city, and the possible effects of climate change on extreme intensities.

Recently Grecia Guijarro has defended her PhD thesis under supervision of Jordi Boronat and Grigory Astrakharchik in the research group "Approaches to the first principles in condensed matter physics: quantum effects and complexity". The theoretical prediction of existence of a novel type of a quantum ultradilute liquid has been published in Physical Review Letters journal. It was found that dipolar interactions on their own are sufficient for creating an ultradilute quantum liquid in a bilayer geometry.