It has been 4 months since the beginning of the confinement. Barcelona was stricken by the CoVid-19 as was the rest of the world. Fortunately, things are getting better and Barcelona ended the confinement the 21st of June together with the rest of Spain. It has been a difficult time for many who have seen their lifestyle seriously affected and their jobs frozen or even worse, cancelled. We still do not know what the economical magnitude of this situation will be or how the world is planning to recover from this.
However, the Fusion Group feels deeply privileged as our work has not been cancelled nor stopped at any point. We have been and are working remotely (from home), following the recommendations of the government. The main European fusion projects under EUROfusion we are working with, JET and AUG, have recently resumed their experimental activities and the modelling efforts have been increased during the confinement. Furthermore, in order to cover all the projects where the Fusion Group is involved, two new researchers have been recruited: Dr. Francisco Fernández and Dr. Julio Gutiérrez. They will work within the Ris3Cat FusionCAT project.
Dr. Francisco Fernández obtained a B.Eng of Mechanical Ingineering in 2009 from the Universidad Pontificia de Comillas (ICAI) and a M.Eng in Mechanical Engineering in 2011 from the same university. He holds a Ph.D in Plasma Physics and Nuclear Fusion in 2018 from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid with the thesis titled “Doppler reflectometry studies in the TJ-II stellarator: comparison between simulations and experimental results”. His research line will be based on computational modelling of High Temperature Superconductors (HTS) by Finite Element Method using the High Performance Computing Mechanics ALYA.
Dr. Julio Gutiérrez graduated in Physics from the University of Granada in Spain. He completed his PhD as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Ioannina in Greece. After that he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Materials Modelling for Devices group at Tyndall National Institute (University College Cork, Ireland) and at the Institute for Advanced Study at Shenzhen University in China. His research line will be focused on the atomistic modelling of materials for fusion. He will study the structure of point defects and grain boundaries in W and W-based alloys by Linear-Scaling Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations within the framework of the BigDFT code, and molecular dynamics simulations. The project will run in close collaboration with Stephan Mohr (BSC and NEXTMOL).
We would like to warmly welcome Dr. Francisco Fernández and Dr. Julio Gutiérrez to our group. We would also like to express that we are grateful our work and funding have continued during these difficult times. Fusion can’t wait!
Stay safe.
FusionCAT has been partly co-financed by the European Union Regional Development Fund (ERDF) within the framework of the ERDF Operational Program of Catalonia 2014-2020.
Great!