Aeronautics PhD Prize winners announced

Congratulations to Dr Giovanni Fantuzzi, who has won the 2017-18 Department of Aeronautics PhD Prize.

Dr Fantuzzi was awarded the prize for his PhD Dissertation ‘Construction of optimal background fields using semidefinite programming’.

Congratulations also to Dr Pawel Baj and Dr Gianmaria Bullegas, who were the two equal runners-up. The titles of their PhD Dissertations are:

• "Experimental investigation of wake development and mixing behind a multi-scale array of bars" (Pawel Baj)
• "Carbon Fibre laminates with engineered fracture behaviour" (Gianmaria Bullegas)

The prize is awarded each year to the best thesis completed by Aeronautics PhD Students.

The Department’s Research Committee reviewed all twenty-eight PhD theses completed from 2 October 2017 to 1 October 2018, and produced a shortlist of three leading candidates.

These were carefully scrutinised by a separate sub-committee of three senior Professors who held no relation to the PhD students.

Finally, Giovanni Fantuzzi was chosen as the prize winner. Dr Fantuzzi’s dissertation proposed a fundamentally new method to rigorously estimate the properties of turbulence, based on the combination of two traditionally separate disciplines: fluid mechanics and convex optimization.

Upon receiving the prize, Dr Fantuzzi said “I am both thrilled and honoured to be awarded this prize. It recognises an important milestone in my research career and gives me strong motivation for the future.”

“The Department of Aeronautics is an exciting place to study: the constant support and great opportunities I was presented with were essential to the success of my PhD. I am extremely grateful for them, and I would also like to thank my supervisor Dr. Andrew Wynn for patiently offering invaluable advice throughout my studies.”