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Latest news on the activity of the SENER Foundation, its engineeringscholarships and research awards.

SENER Foundation Best Doctoral Thesis Award given to PhD from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid


The SENER Foundation, an institution that is part of the engineering and technology group SENER, presented the III Best Doctoral Thesis Award. This year’s award went to Joao Ricardo Pereira Valente for his thesis ‘Aerial Coverage Path Planning applied to Mapping’, with which he earned his doctorate from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid UPM (Spain).

The SENER Foundation’s award for the Best Doctoral Thesis is an annual honor designed to stimulate research at the highest levels of the scientific and technical areas where SENER is active: Aerospace, Power and Process, Infrastructures and Transport, and Marine.

The ceremony took place the morning of April 23 at SENER’s facilities in Madrid. The award was presented by Enrique de Sendagorta, President of the SENER Foundation and Honorary President of the SENER Group, and included €12,000 for the author and €3,000 for the thesis supervisors, who were faculty members Antonio Barrientos Cruz and Jaime del Cerro Giner. Also in attendance were SENER President Jorge Sendagorta, SENER Foundation Director Juan Seijas, and the trustees of the Foundation.

The judging panel was made up of professors from the aforementioned scientific and technical disciplines, PhDs from SENER’s technical corps and doctorate-holding trustees of the SENER Foundation. In the words of Juan Seijas, Joao Ricardo Pereira Valente’s work was worthy of the prize because: “this thesis concerns mini UAVs – unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones – which are a growing area of public interest, as uses continue to be found for them in new applications in a wide array of fields, from delivering packages to land measurement. As a result, efforts must be made to develop optimization and management techniques for their use. This thesis centers on using UAVs for remote sensing and georeferencing. The thesis is structured very well and the way it combines the theoretical and experimental bases is excellent. Furthermore, the tests were original and manifold, and the scientific and international dissemination of the thesis is remarkable. It is an honor for the SENER Foundation to reward theses such as this; theses that are scientifically rigorous, technically advanced and of great relevance to developments in engineering in the years ahead.”

The submission period for the IV Best Doctoral Thesis Award will open in the third quarter of 2015.