FCT scholarship recipient wins award for Best Doctoral Thesis in Applied and Computational Mechanics

Bernardo Ferreira, who was an FCT doctoral fellow at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, was awarded the prize for Best Doctoral Thesis in Applied and Computational Mechanics 2022 by APMTAC—the Portuguese Association of Applied and Computational Mechanics.

The award recognized Bernardo Ferreira's project "Towards Data-driven Multi-scale Optimization of Thermoplastic Blends: Microstructural Generation, Constitutive Development, and Clustering-based Reduced-Order Modeling," for which this distinction "is recognition of my career as a student and researcher at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto."

Bernardo also revealed that he was encouraged to apply for this award by some of his professors, namely Francisco Pires, Miguel Bessa, and Pedro Camanho, and states that "despite the recognition given by the award itself, it was the goals achieved in my PhD and the excellent research team I was part of that allowed me to continue my career at Brown University in the United States." He also emphasized the importance of being awarded the FCTStudentship , as it was this support that "fully funded my PhD," and with that, "the FCT allowed me to complete my training and start my professional career as a researcher."

Bernardo Ferreira's research project consisted of developing several computational tools which, when properly integrated, enable the design and optimization of composite materials through artificial intelligence. In particular, these tools are capable of generating reliable computational models of the material's microstructure, mathematically describing the mechanical behavior of the different constituents, and efficiently generating databases of the material's effective response.

Bernardo Ferreira's thesis is also a candidate for the "ECCOMAS Award for the two best PhD Theses in 2022 on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering."