News

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.

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

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.

A collaboration between the groups of Daniel Crespo from the Department of Physics and Jordi Llorca and Lluís Soler from the Department of Chemical Engineering has studied new routes to obtain catalysts from dispersed Pd clusters onto TiO2.

As a result of a collaboration with researchers from the University of Córdoba, M. Carmen Casas and Raúl Rodríguez have evaluated the quality of the rainfall data of Andalusia available since 1870, long before the first modern meteorological stations were put into operation, and have analyzed the different rainfall patterns in the region in pursuit of the detection of possible changes caused by global warming

On June 20, Juan Carlos Flores defended his thesis directed by professors Daniel Crespo and José Calderón, presenting new routes for obtaining nano-particles

Riccardo Silini defended his thesis co-directed by Cristina Masoller and Marcelo Barreiro on July 5 at the Terrassa Campus. Titled "Causal inference and forecasting methods for climate data analysis", the thesis presents data analysis techniques to identify those processes that contain causal information for the prediction of a process of interest, and machine learning algorithms to improve the prediction of the climatic phenomenon called Madden-Julian oscillation.

The researcher from the Department of Physics has been awarded the Narcís Monturiol Medal for her outstanding contribution to the development of science and technology in Catalonia.

María Caamaño defended her thesis co-directed by José Miguel Juan Zornoza and Jaume Sanz Subirana on July 12 at the North Campus of Barcelona. Titled "Network-Based Ionospheric Gradient Monitoring to Support Ground Based Augmentation Systems", the thesis presents a new concept for monitoring ionospheric gradients in systems installed at airports to ensure the safety of civil aviation operations.

The council of the Department of Physics was held on Monday 18 July under the direction of Jordi Boronat, director of the Department