IEEE NPSS Paul Phelps 2024 award

The IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society (NPSS) is the premier professional association for the advancement of the nuclear and plasma sciences, sponsoring seven technical conferences and three peer-reviewed journals. PhD students Martin Roche and Fiammetta Fricano are recipients of the association's 2024 Paul Phelps Award, that recognizes “exceptional promise as a student, postdoc or research associate in any of the fields of NPSS, or exceptional work in those fields”.

Martin and Fiammetta received their award at the 2024 NSREC Conference in Ottawa, Canada, in July 2024. With this new recognition from the IEEE NPSS community, they are following in the footsteps of Adriana Morana, who received the Paul Phelps Award in 2017, Imene Reghouia in 2018, Marine Aubry in 2021, and Cosimo Campanella in 2022.

Fiammetta Fricano 

Fiammetta graduated from the University of Palermo in 2020. She completed her master's internship in Spring 2021 with our lab's MOPERE group, working on radiation effects on optical fiber-based dosimetry, and continued with the same team for her doctoral studies under the supervision of Prof. Aziz Boukenter. Her research focuses on the luminescence induced by radiation on several types of optical fibers, aiming to develop a radiation sensor for medical applications. Her doctoral research is funded by the ANR project FIDELIO, led by the Université Jean Monnet in collaboration with the Université de Côte d’Azur, Université de Lille and the company iXblue.
Fiammetta is expected to defend her PhD by the end of the year 2024.

Martin Roche

In 2021, after obtaining a double master's degree from Jean Monnet University and the Telecom Saint-Etienne engineering school, Martin Roche completed his final-year internship at Airbus Defence and Space, in partnership with our MOPERE team at the Hubert Curien Laboratory. During these few months, he discovered and worked on optical fibers and their behaviour in space environments, focusing particularly on telecommunication challenges. Highly interested in this topic, he continued his studies with a PhD thesis at CNES (Centre National d'Études Spatiales), co-funded by the company iXblue and still in partnership with the MOPERE team. He is studying the influence of space radiation on optical fibers, under the supervision of Sylvain Girard and Emmanuel Marin (Hubert Curien Lab), and Nicolas Balcon (iXblue). Martin has actively participated in the LUMINA project, an optical fiber-based dosimeter that was sent to the International Space Station in 2021 during the ESA Alpha mission.

Congratulations both!