Doctoral School

Reading date: 26/10/2026

• FREIXANET DE LA IGLESIA, MARIA JOSEP: Teaching statistics through environmental inquiries: the problematisation process
  
  Author: FREIXANET DE LA IGLESIA, MARIA JOSEP
  Programme: DOCTORAL DEGREE IN ENGINEERING, SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION
  Department: Institute of Education Sciences (ICE)
  Mode: Normal
  Deposit date: 29/09/2026
  Reading date: 26/10/2026
  Reading time: 17:00
  Reading place: Sala d'Actes FIB (híbrida amb GMeet)
  Thesis director: ALSINA AUBACH, MONTSERRAT | BOSCH CASABÒ, MARIANNA
  Thesis abstract: Against the background of the growing role of data and of socially relevant, real-world problems in statistics education, this doctoral thesis investigates the teaching and learning of statistics through inquiry-based instructional formats at the secondary and university levels, with a specific focus on the problematisation process: the transition from a broad, vague generating question to precise statistical investigative questions and, from these, to the design of data collection. The research is framed within the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic (ATD) and the proposal of study and research paths (SRPs) to facilitate the change of educational paradigm, from visiting works to questioning the world.The thesis is articulated through three studies. The first analyses the shift from traditional Project-Based Learning (PBL) to the SRPs proposal and its consequences in the reorganisation of the responsibilities (topogenesis) of teachers and students, while also examining its effects on students' perceptions and engagement. The second study addresses the problem of the teacher management of the problematisation process at the secondary school level, distinguishing the passage from the generating question to the investigative question and the passage from the investigative question to the data-collection instrument. The third study moves to the tertiary level, where it examines how the problematisation process unfolds with real-world sustainability data, differentiating two ways of starting the inquiry: when data are provided or when data needs to be found to answer a question. It also identifies the teaching practices and instructional devices that teachers mobilise to sustain the inquiry.The studies draw on five empirical implementations organised around environmental and sustainability themes. Three were carried out at the secondary level — an initial project-based activity on noise pollution, a first SRP on waste separation, and a collaborative cross-year SRP on air pollution — while two took place within a first-year statistics course for engineering students, addressing water and the building's electricity consumption using real institutional datasets.Across educational levels, the results converge in showing that problematisation is a teachable but non-spontaneous competence that must be explicitly designed and engineered, and that the shift of responsibility from teacher to students depends on enabling conditions such as a legitimising external organisation, a deliberately insufficient initial milieu, structured moments for classifying and refining questions, and the progressive enrichment of the milieu. It also identifies constraints mostly originated by the persistence of the paradigm of visiting works and the lack of adequate pedagogical and didactic infrastructures to sustain the management of inquiry processes. A central, transversal finding is an initial characterisation of teaching praxeologies that help manage different types of problematisation processes and, beyond them, the inquiry dialectics, paying particular attention to the shift of responsibilities between teachers and students. In doing so, the thesis offers a concrete didactic account, within the ATD, of how the responsibility for posing and refining statistically studiable questions can be transferred to students, contributing to current efforts to connect statistics learning with authentic, socially and environmentally relevant inquiry and with the development of students' civic awareness.
  

• GOUMEIDA, KENZA: Consumer and Citizen Preferences Towards Sustainability Attributes and Practices
  
  Author: GOUMEIDA, KENZA
  Programme: DOCTORAL DEGREE IN SUSTAINABILITY
  Department: University Research Institute for Sustainability Science and Technology (IS.UPC)
  Mode: Normal
  Deposit date: 28/09/2026
  Reading date: pending
  Reading time: pending
  Reading place: pending
  Thesis director: GIL ROIG, JOSE MARIA | RAHMANI MEDDOUR, DJAMEL
  Thesis abstract: The transition towards sustainable food systems is widely recognized as one of the major challenges of our time, spanning the production, processing, marketing, and consumption of food. While research on the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of this shift is extensive on the supply side, less is known about the demand side: how consumers and citizens value and act upon sustainability attributes embedded in food products and dietary practices. This thesis addresses this gap by examining consumer and citizen preferences towards sustainability attributes and practices at three points of the food value chain: production, product/distribution, and consumption. Three specific objectives follow: i) to estimate citizens' willingness to support the environmental, social, and economic benefits of more sustainable pig production; ii) to examine consumers' valuation of sustainable, biodegradable food packaging and how it changes as information grows, identifying the underlying consumer segments; and iii) to identify the latent drivers and segments of adherence to a healthy, sustainability-relevant dietary pattern across Spain, Morocco, and Turkey, together with their explanatory factors.For the production objective, a discrete choice experiment (DCE) was administered via an online survey and analyzed with a conditional logit model (CLM) to estimate willingness to pay (WTP) for ecosystem service attributes. Results show significant citizen support for a shift towards lower crude-protein pig diets that reduce environmental emissions and soybean use while improving animal welfare. Support is highest for the greatest environmental improvement and differs across sociodemographic groups, particularly by gender and rural/peri-urban residence, indicating that support for upstream production changes is real but conditional rather than universal.For the product/distribution objective, a non-hypothetical, incentive-compatible experimental auction (EA) was conducted face-to-face using a sequential information disclosure design combined with a hybrid latent class model (HLCM). Results show that consumers' WTP for sustainable packaging builds cumulatively as information progresses from an abstract environmental claim, to physical interaction to full market presentation, indicating that environmental and sensory information reinforce rather than compete with each other. Two consumer segments emerge, "Low-engagement bidders" and "Premium green adopters", differing in their adoption of the sustainable option and in how strongly information shifts their valuation.For the consumption objective, a cross-sectional online survey conducted independently in Spain, Turkey, and Morocco was analyzed using country-specific hybrid latent class models and pooled direct-effects regressions to test formally for cross-country differences in adherence to the Mediterranean diet (AMD). Two comparable segments, "High adherents" and "Moderate adherents", are identified in each country, with nutrition knowledge as the only determinant common to all three. The remaining psychosocial, household, and sociodemographic drivers differ meaningfully across countries, showing that sustainable dietary behavior cannot be explained by a single, universal set of factors.Overall, the three chapters show that sustainability is valued conditionally rather than uniformly along the food value chain. Its value depends on the scale of the benefit at stake, on how sustainability information is communicated, and on who the individual is. Combining these three perspectives within one coherent value-chain narrative provides conceptual, methodological and empirical insight into how demand-side responses to sustainability actually operate throughout the food system, with practical implications for producers, retailers, consumers, and policymakers designing more effective, better-targeted sustainability interventions.
  

• LEYVA SANTES, NEIEL ISRAEL: High Performance Network-on-Chip Designs for Open Manycore Systems
  
  Author: LEYVA SANTES, NEIEL ISRAEL
  Programme: DOCTORAL DEGREE IN COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
  Department: Department of Computer Architecture (DAC)
  Mode: Normal
  Deposit date: 16/09/2026
  Reading date: 26/10/2026
  Reading time: 11:00
  Reading place: Sala C6-E106
  Thesis director: ÁLVAREZ MARTÍ, LLUC | VALLEJO GUTIÉRREZ, ENRIQUE
  Thesis abstract: The transition from multicore to manycore architectures is a direct consequence of the limitations of frequency scaling and the need to sustain performance growth through parallelism. As a result, modern processors integrate an increasing number of cores within a single chip, which significantly raises the demands on on-chip communication and memory systems.In parallel, open instruction set architectures such as RISC-V have enabled the emergence of open hardware ecosystems, where full-system platforms can be designed and explored at the Register-Transfer Level (RTL). Over time, open manycore platforms have evolved from simple educational designs into more complete and scalable infrastructures, incorporating coherent memory hierarchies and Network-on-Chip (NoC) interconnects. This evolution has positioned them as promising candidates not only for reproducible architectural research, but also as realistic foundations for the design and evaluation of future high-performance computing systems. However, reaching this level of applicability requires further improvements in scalability and efficiency, particularly in communication and memory subsystems.In this context, this thesis focuses on advancing the maturity of an open manycore platform to support both architectural research and the development of high-performance computing systems. The objective is to provide a flexible and scalable infrastructure that enables detailed evaluation at the RTL while remaining representative of realistic HPC workloads and supporting system design. To achieve this, the thesis focuses on improving the communication and memory subsystems, as they play a key role in determining system scalability and overall performance. The proposed approach combines methodological and architectural contributions to reduce evaluation cost, enhance system performance, and extend platform configurability. The thesis is structured around three main contributions.First, it presents SynFull-RTL, a methodology for evaluating RTL NoC designs using traffic models derived from real application behavior. By leveraging probability-weighted sampling of execution macro-phases, this approach significantly reduces simulation time while preserving representativeness, achieving up to 40x reduction in time-to-solution.Second, the thesis introduces OpenPiton4HPC, a set of architectural extensions that improve memory bandwidth, reduce communication latency, and increase system configurability. These enhancements include support for multiple memory controllers, NoC optimizations such as router bypassing and wider links, and a tunable cache hierarchy, leading to performance improvements of up to 7.2x over the baseline.Finally, the thesis proposes GS-NoC, a hardware mechanism designed to improve communication efficiency for irregular memory access patterns in vector workloads. By coalescing memory requests at different levels of the system, GS-NoC reduces the number of NoC packets by 52% on average with respect to the Bypass configuration and achieves a geometric mean speed-up of 1.18x compared to a baseline NoC configuration.All contributions are implemented at synthesizable RTL and validated through cycle-accurate simulation, ensuring realistic evaluation and practical applicability. Overall, this work advances the design of open manycore platforms, improving their scalability and effectiveness as research and development infrastructures for future computing systems.
  

• MINI DAS, APARNA: Investigation of Dynamic Catalyst -Electrolyte Interfaces in Electrochemical Systems for Establishing Activity Correlations.
  
  Author: MINI DAS, APARNA
  Programme: DOCTORAL DEGREE IN PHOTONICS
  Department: Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO)
  Mode: Normal
  Deposit date: 28/09/2026
  Reading date: pending
  Reading time: pending
  Reading place: pending
  Thesis director: GARCÍA DE ARQUER, FRANCISCO PELAYO
  Thesis abstract: Rising atmospheric CO2 levels, driven primarily by anthropogenic emissions, are a central contributor to global climate change and environmental instability. Electrocatalytic reactions provide a promising pathway for CO2 emission reduction through electricity-driven conversion of CO2 and/or water into value-added chemicals and fuels. In this context, catalysts are widely recognized as the key determinants of performance. This thesis takes the discussion a step further by examining how, in specific reactions, not only the catalyst itself but also the surrounding environment becomes crucial in defining performance matrices. More specifically, it investigates dynamic catalyst-electrolyte interfaces in water electrolysis and direct bicarbonate reduction, with a particular emphasis on interfacial dynamics and their correlation with activity.The thesis first outlines the fundamental aspects of water electrolysis and bicarbonate reduction, and then presents new concepts and findings on the role of dynamic catalyst-electrolyte interfaces in these systems. To do so, several in situ and operando techniques are employed, including Raman spectroscopy, X-ray absorption spectroscopy, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, and quantitative bubble analysis, complemented by other electrochemical methods to establish correlations with performance.In the case of water electrolysis, the thesis focus on the oxygen evolution reaction, which represents the largest energetic penalty in the system. Correlations spanning atomic to microscale features are identified, collectively shaping the performance landscape of the reaction. Using complementary in situ probes, these correlations are shown to go beyond simple cause-and-effect relationships, highlighting the importance of uncovering the underlying mechanisms rather than relying solely on performance metrics.In direct bicarbonate reduction, performance is strongly influenced by the availability of CO2 at the interface, which is in turn linked to the local pH. Through operando Raman spectroscopy, a descriptor for the interfacial buffering state is identified, providing indirect insight into instantaneous CO2 availability. This hypothesis is further validated by engineering the catalyst-electrolyte interface to actively tune this descriptor, resulting in a threefold improvement in performance. This demonstrates how mechanistic understanding of the catalyst-electrolyte interface can guide informed hypotheses that are ultimately deterministic, reducing the experimental parameter space and improving optimization efficiency.Overall, the thesis emphasizes the importance of understanding why performance improves, rather than simply attributing progress to “better catalysts”. A deeper understanding of these systems, especially at high current densities, can lead to more coherent design principles and challenge existing assumptions about major factors governing the electrochemical performance. The results show that the catalyst surface cannot be considered a static entity, but rather a dynamic system whose structure and reactivity are continuously modulated by external factors. These insights provide a more detailed mechanistic picture of electrochemical interfaces and help identify key descriptors for catalyst design.
  

Reading date: 28/10/2026

• GARATACHEA SOLÉ, ROGER: Domestic and Transboundary Air Pollution across European countries: health impacts and policy implications
  
  Author: GARATACHEA SOLÉ, ROGER
  Programme: DOCTORAL DEGREE IN ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING
  Department: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (DECA)
  Mode: Normal
  Deposit date: 07/09/2026
  Reading date: 28/10/2026
  Reading time: 11:00
  Reading place: UPC, Campus NordBuilding C1. Classroom: 002C/Jordi Girona, 1-308034 Barcelona
  Thesis director: PEREZ GARCIA-PANDO, CARLOS | JORBA CASELLAS, ORIOL
  Thesis abstract: Air pollution remains a major environmental and public health problem in Europe, despite decades of regulation and substantial improvements in air quality. Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and tropospheric ozone (O3) remain two of the most harmful air pollutants. Their formation, transport, and impacts are shaped by complex interactions between local emissions, transboundary pollution, natural sources, atmospheric chemistry, and meteorology. This complexity makes it difficult to determine which sources are responsible for observed pollution levels.This thesis studies the geographical origins of O3 and both geographical and sectoral origins of PM2.5 across Europe, evaluating their implications for health impacts and air-quality governance. Using the CALIOPE regional air-quality modeling system, a tagging approach is applied to quantify domestic, transboundary, maritime, and hemispheric contributions to O3 concentrations and associated short-term mortality. For PM2.5, a perturbation-based approach combined with an observation-constrained methodology is used to quantify source contributions and their related short-term mortality impacts, which are further disaggregated by economic sector and natural sources. The thesis also assesses the feasibility of achieving the revised European Ambient Air Quality Directive PM2.5 standards by 2030 under both current legislation (CLE) and maximum feasible reduction (MFR) pathways.The findings indicate that European air pollution is strongly shaped by sources beyond the jurisdiction in which exposure occurs. For O3, hemispheric and transboundary contributions represent major components of surface concentrations across Europe, underscoring the importance of long-range transport. Consequently, the health impacts related to O3 are also largely driven by imported pollution, which accounts for 88% of all O3-attributable deaths in Europe. However, during high-ozone episodes, local and regional contributions become more relevant, suggesting that domestic and nearby emission reductions can be particularly important under peak O3 levels. For PM2.5, short-term mortality impacts are also strongly influenced by cross-border transport and by the sectoral composition of emissions. Anthropogenic emissions accounted for 55% of PM2.5-attributable deaths, with 35% of this anthropogenic burden resulting from cross-border transport within Europe. Residential combustion emerges as the main anthropogenic source, although agriculture, road transport, industry, and power generation can also make important contributions depending on the region and season.The PM2.5 compliance analysis shows that projected emission reductions are expected to substantially improve air quality by 2030, but important governance challenges will remain. CLE would enable many European air-quality zones to meet the revised PM2.5 limit values, with further improvements under MFR. However, a large share of zones reaching compliance under CLE reductions remain cooperation-dependent, requiring emission reductions in foreign countries rather than domestic action alone. Excluding natural-source contributions further increases attainment, highlighting the role of sources that are not fully controllable through national mitigation policies. These results show that remaining non-compliance reflects not only insufficient domestic action, but also transboundary dependencies, natural contributions, and the limitations of national policy instruments.Overall, this thesis demonstrates that source-resolved modelling is crucial to understand air quality results, estimate health impacts, and design effective compliance strategies. Achieving European air-quality standards will require not only ambitious emission reductions, but also coordinated international action and regulatory frameworks that explicitly account for the transboundary nature of atmospheric pollution.