Periodic Reporting for period 3 - NUMERICS (International PhD programme in NUMERICal Simulation)
Période du rapport: 2022-10-01 au 2025-03-31
CEA has been recognized as an expert in scientific and technological research in this strategic area but ambitions to increase its competitiveness by renewing its research organisation and training capabilities, thus developing its expertise, accelerating development, and internationalizing its position. In this context, the NUMERICS project promoted cutting edge research in scientific domains with real prospects yet still poorly developed at CEA by proposing an innovative PhD training that focuses on “numerical simulation and scientific computing” as transversal research activities that will act as leading stakeholder for CEA and further outline the existing PhD programme.
Thus, 45 international fellowships have been awarded for PhD projects taking place in CEA laboratories stimulating base camps for all PhD students. The project strongly contributed to the development of European research and human resource capacities as well as knowledge transfer between academic, research institutions and industry. In this regard, NUMERICS strengthened the development and innovation of EU industries in many competitive areas impacted by numerical simulation, e.g. energy, transport, health, climate. Training NUMERICS PhDs to the high standard set out in the programme lead to introducing a new generation of researchers able to answer the societal challenges addressed by European Commission. Indeed, NUMERICS fellows contributed to health, energy and transport challenges with 5 patents being filed. Most of the NUMERICS students successfully pursued their professional life, the majority (85%) in R&D companies, start-ups or academic research (40% as post-doc). A few of them oriented their professional life more into higher education or science administration.
- more than 80 scientific publications on peer review journal
- 5 patents (3 on the health, 1 on the energy and 1 on the transport area)
- participation to over 60 scientific international and national conferences and workshops.
- 42 PhD thesis defense (two NUMERICS students took a position before the end of the thesis and one thesis will be defended in July 2025)
The overall communication of the NUMERICS project was done mainly on the NUMRICS website and via the INSTN LinkedIn profile. The final project completion has been highlighted on March 20 in Grenoble at the GIANT Innovation Campus during the "Junior Scientist & Industry Annual Meeting, 2025", a networking day for young researchers from industry and start-ups. At this occasion the NUMERICS fellows were invited to share their experience as PhD students of a Marie-Curie COFUND Doctoral EU project. A poster with the output of the NUMERICS project has been presented. Paula Kleij and Gerardo Emanuel Granados acted as ambassadors of the project. They were present at this event together with the management staff.
- "Development of a lifetime estimation methodology for electric vehicles Li-ion batteries", PhD candidate: Marc Haber. The goal of this PhD thesis is to improve the lifetime estimation and aging models of Li-ion batteries for electric vehicles application by developing more reliable and representative accelerated aging protocols. A long-term vision of battery lifetime has economic and environmental impact.
- "Artificial intelligence for real-time decoding of motor commands from ECoG of disabled subjects for chronic brain computer interfacing", PhD candidate: Maciej Śliwowski. The goal of the PhD project is to create an innovative Artificial Intelligence (AI) based system using Machine Learning to decode motor commands from ECoG signal of disabled humans and apply it to real-life experiments.
- "Numerical methods for an autonomous personalized device for monitoring transpired gases", PhD candidate: Maria-Paula Comsa. The project aims at the development of an individual device, which can monitor the level of carbon dioxide in the blood in a robust and quantitative autonomous way.
Indeed, the work of NUMERICS PhD students have received attention in an international setting. The effort of Maciej Śliwowski (CEA/DRT CLINATEC) obtained the 2021 3rd place award at the BEETL competition. Paula Kleij (LSI, CEA) received at the 2021 47th EPS Plasma Physics conference the Student Poster Prize for the poster on "Ultra short electron bunches from tunable surface plasma wave excitation by laser with wavefront rotation". Finally, Simone Braccio thesis work on batteries got the CODEGEPRA thesis prize. His thesis work focused on the “Numerical and experimental study of a combined cycle of cold and electricity production”, and has been done in collaboration between the LOCIE laboratory of the University of Savoie Mont-Blanc and the CEA-LITEN at INES.