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The ISAE-SUPAERO Foundation’s entrepreneurship prize has been awarded to Paul Lascombes, a graduate of ISAE-SUPAERO (S2017) and École Polytechnique (X2013), co-founder and Scientific Director of EXOTRAIL, founded in 2017. Exotrail is a start-up that designs and supplies transport solutions for the space sector. It markets electric propulsion systems to small satellite manufacturers.
For Paul, everything started during his studies at École Polytechnique (X2013) where he carried out a scientific project to develop an instrument to measure the thrust of an electric microthruster. Thanks to this project, which he worked on in 2014/2015, he became interested in space and in the opportunities for marketing this new kind of thruster adapted to nanosatellites. This project planted the seeds for the Exotrail adventure launched in 2015. During his studies, first at École Polytechnique and then at ISAE-SUPAERO (S2017), Paul Lascombes developed his scientific culture and his entrepreneurial culture while starting to work more and more intensely for Exotrail.
In 2017, after his end-of-studies internship at Airbus Defence and Space, he joined Exotrail full time to prepare two projects: setting up the company from a strategic and technical point of view in order to raise the initial funds, but also technical coordination that would enable him to capitalize on the knowledge acquired during development with SATT Paris-Saclay, (Société d’Accélération du Transfert de Technologies (SATT) facilitates and develops the transfer of innovations from public academic research). This was done to launch the technology foundations necessary for the demonstration mission, all with a small team of 6 people.
After raising this initial capital and a substantial increase in the team, Paul’s work turned to three main aspects connected to his title of Scientific Director:
Operational management of the software development team based in Toulouse.
Technical organization of the entire team and coordination of R&D.
His role is to constructively question the technical choices made by the development teams. He ensures the coherency of all the activities and technical interactions for the various development aspects and coordinates R&D actions.
Definition of Exotrail’s long-term strategy. He oversees discussions on the SpaceVan (orbital transport vehicle housing nanosatellites to transport them from their launch orbit to their final operational orbit) and keeps up with launch problems and in-orbit services.
The entrepreneurship prize launched by the ISAE-SUPAERO Foundation in 2019 aims at encouraging entrepreneurship; the prize is a way to provide support for start-uppers in their promising, innovative projects, notably in the aviation, space and defense fields.

The ISAE-SUPAERO Foundation’s entrepreneurship prize has been awarded to Antoine Tournet, an ISAE-SUPAERO graduate in the ENSICA class of 2018, co-founder and CEO of DIODON Drone Technology, founded in 2017. The start-up designs and produces all-terrain drones for applications in demanding environments.
The DIODON inflatable drone project was undertaken with Roman Luciani, also an ISAE-SUPAERO graduate in the ENSICA class of 2018, from the start of their studies at ISAE-SUPAERO in 2014.
During his preparatory school studies, Antoine, a winter sports enthusiast, carried out several engineering projects on such topics as the vibratory bowl feeders on the production lines at LEGRAND or the methods used to install rivets at AIRBUS. At the same time, the tech-savvy Roman studied the development of a multirotor drone at his preparatory school.
These experiences bringing together team management and advanced technologies were valuable to them and gave them the desire to undertake their own innovative technological project. As classmates they came together in this shared taste for entrepreneurship. The complementarity between their skills is what gave them the idea to develop the first drone with an inflatable structure – the DIODON.
Throughout their studies, they spent their time developing this new product: Roman was in charge of technological development and Antoine dealt with business development and finance.
DIODON was born of a desire to bring technology into hard-to-access environments. It is now a business with a structure that enables it to develop its R&D capacities while ensuring its products’ in-house industrialization. Recruitment, office space and production processes have been planned accordingly.
Housed at ISAE-SUPAERO since 2017, DIODON moved to the PROLOGUE business incubator in Labège in February 2019 and now has 25 employees – a figure that should increase by the year 2022.

A 2015 graduate of the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées in Rennes (INSA Rennes), Alexandre started his thesis at ISAE-SUPAERO in 2017 after spending some time at STMicroelectronics in Singapore. Vincent Goiffon, a professor at ISAE-SUPAERO, and Cédric Virmontois of the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) supervised his thesis, carried out with support from CNES and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA - Commissariat de l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives).
His thesis work dealt with the study of the effects of nuclear and space radiations on CMOS image sensors, the goal being to improve space instruments and plasma diagnostics for nuclear fusion. More precisely, the study focused on the crystal defects induced by the radiation causing an increase in dark current. These studies contribute to improving our understanding of the physical principles at work in silicon affected by radiation.
Alexandre is the author or co-author of 11 publications. He has presented his work at the RADECS 2017, NSREC 2018, IISW 2019 and NSREC 2019 international conferences. He won various awards while he was working on this thesis. These include the international “Paul Phelps Award” grant from the NPSS chapter at IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) as well as the award for the best student article and best article at the RADECS 2019 conference. Alexandre also took part in opening the IEEE student branch at ISAE-SUPAERO in 2017 and presided over it until 2020.
Alexandre Le Roch defended his thesis in July 2020 and is currently working as a research engineer at ISAE-SUPAERO in collaboration with CNES. His research activities focus on the behavior of CMOS image sensors in contact with radiation for future missions that will explore the Jovian system (Jupiter), a very severe radiative environment. He will soon join the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) at NASA to pursue this work on imaging systems’ behavior in contact with radiation. He sums up his thesis for you in 3 minutes flat
This thesis prize was presented by the ISAE-SUPAERO Foundation for the excellence of the research carried out and the outlook for the thesis’ applications.

Pablo Caron received the ISAE-SUPAERO Foundation’s thesis prize for his thesis work on singular events induced by electrons in integrated technologies. He earned a Master’s in Space Techniques and Instrumentation from Université III Paul Sabatier in Toulouse and prepared his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Christophe Inguimbert (ONERA), Laurent Artola (ONERA) and Robert Ecoffet (CNES) at the DPHY department (Department of Physics, Instrumentation, Environment and Space) at ONERA in Toulouse.
His work, financed by ONERA and CNES, dealt with the study of singular events induced by electrons in integrated technologies. Embedded electronics, and notably embedded memories, are sensitive to the radiative environments around them. This sensitivity can take on several forms ranging from the loss of one piece of data to the destruction of a component.
In 2014, the first error measurements (SEU - Single-Event Upsets) of a SRAM memory were made. Pablo Caron’s work enters into this context of trying to understand the physical mechanisms responsible for the errors observed. Pablo Caron is a Research Engineer at ONERA Toulouse at the DPHY/ERS (Spatial Radiative Environment) unit whose main missions are to measure the particles that populate the radiation belts and the development of models dedicated to the specification of environments in relation to future space missions. He sums up his thesis for you in 3 minutes flat!
This thesis prize was presented by the ISAE-SUPAERO Foundation for the excellence of the research carried out and the outlook for the thesis’ applications.

The ISAE-SUPAERO Foundation thesis prize has been awarded to Simone Coniglio for his thesis titled "Topological 𝗢𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 with Eulerian and Lagrangian formalism applied to the design of a propulsion unit"
A 2016 graduate of the Université de Technologie de Compiègne and the Università Politecnico di Torino, with an end-of-studies internship on the topological optimization of damping treatments at Airbus Group Innovation, Simone Coniglio began his thesis in October 2016 under the supervision of Joseph Morlier (Research Professor at ISAE-SUPAERO), Christian Gogu (Research Professor at Université Paul Sabatier) and Rémi Amargier (Doctor of Engineering at Airbus), with CIFRE financing.
His thesis deals with topological optimization applied to the primary structure integrating engines under the wings of civil aircraft. In his thesis, a framework for topological optimization is developed to improve the design of an engine pylon, engine supports and nacelles. The optimum design is obtained by taking into account the von Mises stress constraint and a requirement unique to the engine’s design, or a reduction of the variations in the play at the ends of an engine’s blades under the loads of aircraft maneuvers. He sums up his thesis for you in 3 minutes flat.
Since November 2019, Simone has been working at Airbus on topological and parametric optimization for the propulsion unit’s integration.

Erwan Lecarpentier, a doctoral student at the Department of Complex System Engineering (DISC), has received the ISAE-SUPAERO Foundation thesis prize for his work on Reinforcement Learning in a Non-stationary Environment. A 2016 ISAE-SUPAERO graduate with ENSICA engineering training, Erwan prepared his doctoral thesis at ISAE-SUPAERO and ONERA under the supervision of Emmanuel Rachelson, Professor of Automatic Learning and Optimization at ISAE-SUPAERO, and Guillaume Infantes, researcher at JoliBrain (an artificial intelligence software and service company).
After defending his thesis in 2020, Erwan continued his work with Emmanuel Rachelson and is now looking for a postdoctoral position to pursue his career in academics. Reinforcement learning is a sub-branch of automatic learning that deals with solving the problem of sequential decision-making in discrete time. It is a question of automatically learning the optimum behavior for an agent interacting with an uncertain environment.
How do you teach machines to control complex problems? Erwan sums up his thesis for you in 3 minutes flat! This thesis prize was presented by the ISAE-SUPAERO Foundation for the excellence of the research carried out and the outlook for the thesis’ applications.

Discover Eric Nguyen Van’s thesis, which he defended at ISAE-SUPAERO on October 23rd. Eric is now a research engineer in aeronautical design with the Multidisciplinary Methods and Integrated Design team at ONERA’s Department of Data Processing and Systems (DTIS).
Eric worked on his thesis at the Department of Aerospace Vehicle Design and Control (DCAS), in the Decisions and Commands research group.
The title of his thesis is “Stability and lateral control of an aircraft with small vertical stabilizers through differential use of propulsion systems or actuators such as crocodile flaps . Use of co-design methods”. The goal is to offer a co-design method for designing the engine command laws and sizing the vertical stabilizer while complying with the constraints of flight quality and security, as well as to provide a benchmark with a solution that has been flight tested on a demonstrator. It was useful to create a demonstrator to study electric propulsion and lateral flight mechanics both for the CEDAR Chair and for the thesis.
Eric works with the CSDV – Systems Command and Flight Dynamics – doctoral host team and at the Systems Doctoral School (EDSYS), which includes researchers from ISAE-SUPAERO and ONERA. His work was co-supervised by Daniel Alazard and Philippe Pastor, research professors at ISAE-SUPAERO, and by Carsten Döll at ONERA.
His thesis was also financed under the CEDAR Chair (Chair for Eco-Design of AiRcraft) in a partnership with AIRBUS, whose purpose is to provide answers to the environmental issues facing the aeronautical sector by defining disruptive concepts in air transport through the inclusion of innovative technologies starting in the aircraft design stage. In 2019, this partnership was renewed, taking up the main orientations from the previous years and integrating a more comprehensive approach to environmental engineering.
ISAE-SUPAERO welcomes doctoral students to six teams at ISAE-SUPAERO, ONERA and the Clément Ader Institute, covering a wide range of scientific disciplines in relation to aeronautics and space: aerodynamics and propulsion, structures and materials, embedded systems, networks and telecommunications, systems command and control, human factors, electronics, and signals. ISAE-SUPAERO proposes a rich, diverse PhD training program, leading to a doctorate, the highest level degree awarded by the Institute and recognized internationally.

The subject of his thesis is: "Plasma-based electrically small antenna"
He is affiliated with OLIMPES doctoral research team - Optronics, laser, physical imagery and space environment. His thesis is funded by The Defense Innovation Agency (AID) and DGA, the French Defence Procurement Agency and the Occitan region. He has two thesis director, Romain Pascaud (ISAE-SUPAERO) and Olivier Pascal (LAPLACE).
ISAE-SUPAERO welcomes its doctoral students in six ISAE-SUPAERO, ONERA teams and Clément Ader Institute, covering a wide spectrum of scientific disciplines related to aeronautics and space: aerodynamics and propulsion, structures and materials, embedded systems, networks and telecommunications, control and management of systems, human factors, electronics, signal.
ISAE-SUPAERO offers a rich and diversified program of doctoral training, leading to the PhD, the highest degree awarded by the institute, and recognized internationally.