The Foundation extends its warmest congratulations to Arthur Péquin and Joseph Salinas, both recipients of a Wiener-Anspach doctoral fellowship in 2021-2022, who recently defended their PhD thesis.

Arthur Péquin and Alessandro Parente (Universitè libre de Bruxelles, 6 July 2023).

Arthur Péquin, PhD in Aero-Thermo-Mechanics (ULB), worked under the supervision of Professor Alessandro Parente (Brussels School of Engineering). As part of his doctoral research, titled “Direct Numerical Simulation Analysis of the Partially Stirred Reactor Model for Turbulent Reacting Flows” (available here), he spent a semester working with Professor Nedunchezhian Swaminathan at the Department of Engineering of the University of Cambridge.

As he explains, “during this project, we developed solutions for the numerical modelling of MILD combustion, a promising combustion regime with low pollutant emissions. The idea was to train machine learning algorithms on high-fidelity data generated at the University of Cambridge. This new tool makes MILD combustion modelling more accessible at the industrial scale.”

This exchange stems from a a wider collaboration between Professors Parente and Swaminathan, who were the promoters of a research project supported by the FWA from 2018 to 2020 (“Alchemy – Machine learning for complex multi-physics problems“).

Workers in the Oleoflores palm mill in Montes de María, Colombia.

Joseph Salinas was granted a Wiener-Anspach doctoral fellowship to spend an academic year in Brussels and work at the ULB with Professor Olivia Angé (LAMC – Laboratoire d’anthropologie des mondes contemporains), herself an Alumna of the Foundation. His thesis, written under the supervision of Dr David Nally (Department of Geography, University of Cambridge), is titled “Debt as Infrastructure: Contract Farming, Labour, and Oil Palm in Montes de María”.

This work “interrogates the operation of credit for contracted palm oil production and its impact on the lives of peasant communities in the Colombian Caribbean”, approaching “debt as an infrastructure of agrarian capitalism that underpins and transforms agrarian lives”.

Commenting on his research stay at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Joseph writes: “The ULB offered me a place where I could reflect on my ideas from a multidisciplinary point of view. Being able to present my work to sharp anthropologists and in the department’s seminars, having the opportunity to participate in the multiple reading and research groups hosted by the LAMC – all this was very significant”.

The Foundation wishes Dr Péquin and Dr Salinas the best in this new chapter of their career.