IKERLAN holds its third Doctoral Conference to acknowledge PhD students’ research work

• The event was held at Orona Ideo and forms part of IKERLAN’s commitment to training students as specialist technologists.
• The entity currently has 44 ongoing doctoral theses and has been able to earmark more than €1m to student training in 2018, thanks to collaboration with over a dozen universities.

With the aim of encouraging and acknowledging its doctorate students’ work, the IKERLAN technology centre held its third PhD students conference today at Orona Ideo in Hernani.

IKERLAN currently has 44 ongoing doctoral theses, in collaboration with over a dozen universities. This figure shows the centre’s strategic commitment to excellence, as it aims to have a highly qualified pool of postgraduates to cater to the industry’s current and future technology challenges.

In 2018, the centre invested over €1m in the training, professionalisation and specialisation of its students.

“Excellence training through doctoral degrees has been one of IKERLAN’s strategic commitments for more than a decade and is one of the Centre’s main sources of researcher recruitment”, says IKERLAN’s Knowledge Manager Ana Martínez Esnaola.

In addition to highlighting the important work done by the PhD students and their contribution to IKERLAN’s research lines, Ms. Martínez stresses “the great job done by the doctoral thesis supervisors at the different universities and also by IKERLAN’s in-house supervisors. The success of all these projects would not be possible without them, so another aim of this event is to acknowledge their work and dedication”.

An event for sharing knowledge and experience

The conference was attended by around 120 people including PhD students, doctoral thesis directors and supervisors, researchers and other participants, and its special guest was Igor Cantero, the R&D Manager of Cegasa Portable Energy, who gave the lecture “Doctors in industry… is that possible? (and we don’t mean the company’s medical doctor)”.

“This lecture aimed to show the PhD students the huge contribution that doctoral graduates can make to industrial companies, thanks to their technology specialisation and command of the methodology”, Mr. Cantero explains.

The conference continued with the lecture “3 Years, 2 Viewpoints, 1 Thesis… (to be continued)”, given by IKERLAN researcher and doctoral thesis supervisor Cristóbal Arellano and Aitziber Iglesias, a PhD student also at IKERLAN, explaining the experience of a doctoral degree from two complementary viewpoints.

This was followed by a poster session for the PhD students to show the main aspects of the doctoral theses they are currently undertaking at IKERLAN. The event concluded with the presentation of IKERLAN’s awards for the best papers submitted.