The ISAE-SUPAERO Foundation’s 2020 thesis prizes!

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The ISAE-SUPAERO Foundation awarded 4 thesis prizes in 2020 to Erwan Lecarpentier, Simone Coniglio, Pablo Caron and Alexandre LeRoch for the excellence of the research carried out during their 4 thesis and their application perspectives! They summarize their work in 3 minutes top time, 180 seconds!

Since its creation, the Foundation has awarded 51 thesis prizes to encourage doctoral studies and promote research in the aerospace sector.

Erwan Lecarpentier

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.


Simone Coniglio

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.


Pablo Caron

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.


Alexandre LeRoch

Alexandre Le Roch, a doctoral student at the Department of Electronics, Optronics and Signal Processing (DEOS), has received the ISAE-SUPAERO Foundation thesis prize for his work on the analysis of the increase and discrete fluctuation of dark current in CMOS image sensors in radiative nuclear and space environments.

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.

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