On the 21st of March, Mahendra Paipuri defended his PhD thesis. Mahendra is one of the many SEED PhD students that applied and accomplished their research program. As part of the The Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate SEED (Simulation in Engineering and Entrepreneurship Development), he developed his research between two different institutions, the Instituto Superior Technico (IST) in Lisbon and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Barcelona, both forming part of the SEED consortium which includes 8 full partners (universities) and 5 associated partners. Because of this coututelle, the PhD thesis defense took place in Lisbon, but students and professors of Barcelona could attend it by videoconference.
In the half an hour at his disposal Mahendra presented his research proposing a coupled Continuous Galerkin (CG) and Hybridizable Discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) formulation to solve conjugate heat transfer problems. In particular, a formulation coupling an HDG domain with a CG domain is developed and studied for heat problems. Finally an application of this model has been shown and used in order to find the thermal response of Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer tubular cross-section under fire. It goes without saying that all the scientific results obtained by each of the PhD students who joined the SEED program are first due to their own ability and strength in achieving their goal, but also, to this beautiful program which gives them the possibility of being a real citizen of the world living in different countries and working in such international context. This experience for sure will have a huge impact in the life of all of them. And it is what I expect from my experience too, as it has a lot in common with Mahendra’s one. Starting from his research topic (HDG) which is also a milestone of my PhD thesis, passing through the necessity of moving abroad from his native country, living in different cities, meeting new people, I could parallelise myself and reflect on the fact that hopefully in a couple of years, the student defending his PhD thesis in front of people thousands of miles away could be me… and that was awesome! And I really wanted to share this feeling to disclose which possibilities our generation has.
Unfortunately in 2017 there wasn’t a call for SEED scholarships, nevertheless, in March 2018 a call for specific PhD positions associated with a new EU project with similar topics to those covered by SEED have been opened. 
It is funded within the framework of the H2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie ITN ProTechTion “Industrial decision-making on complex Production Technologies supported by simulaTion-based engineering”. Thanks to these new funds, the well-established relationships based on several years of collaborations between all the institutions of the SEED consortium, can be inherited by a new project and continue to sow the “seed” of the internationality and world-citizenship.