Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) aims to contribute to the improvement of the society through education of the highest quality and advanced research activities, following strict international criteria. The University pursues excellence in all its activities, and its ultimate goal is to become one of the best universities in Europe and the world. The internationalization strategy is fully aligned with its mission and values, and provides the tools to identify and integrate an international, intercultural and global dimension into the University's mission and activities. The overall target of our internationalisation strategy is to improve the quality of our education and research, attract talent and promote an international profile, opening our campuses to the world. The University wants to be more global, developing its activity on an international scale, wants to approach research and teaching from an interdisciplinary perspective, and wants to be more open to society, to the surrounding community and to the world in all its aspects.Internationalization at UC3M is based on a multidimensional strategy whereby the international component permeates all UC3M departments. Each singular objective related to teaching, research, attracting talent and promoting an international profile is achieved through the coordinated work of different agents, both inside and outside the University, with the participation of the areas responsible for studies, staff, research and internationalization being key, as well as being part of international and national strategic alliances, for example the European University initiative YUFE (Young Universities for the Future of Europe), the YERUN network (Young European Research University Network) or the A4U (Alliance 4 Universities).In this context, UC3M's internationalization strategy with partner countries is highly relevant, and since 2007 the collaboration with universities in the United States, Latin America, Asia and Oceania, has increased significantly.As a result of this collaboration, in the 2018-19 academic year, 781 mobility spots were offered for undergraduate students in the framework of our own Non-European Mobility programme. Although this offer represents a great effort and an increase compared to previous years, it is not enough to cover the great demand for mobility from our students and teaching and administrative staff.In order to increase the resources to consolidate the exchanges implemented in previous years and to include universities with which we had no exchange experience, the Erasmus+ ICM application was presented for the second year, including the following universities: Purdue University (USA), Université Mohammed I (Morocco), Ateneo de Manila (Philippines), Singapore Management University, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua, Universidad de Oriente (Cuba), Instituto Superior Minero Metalúrgico de Moa (Cuba), Universidad de Cuenca (Ecuador), Universidad Técnica de Cotopaxi (Ecuador), Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá, Universidad de Panamá and Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (Israel).Finally, 48 mobility places were obtained for students and staff with Purdue University, Université Mohammed I, Ateneo de Manila and Singapore Management University. Subsequently, Georgia Institute of Technology, Mapua University and Universite Cadi Ayyad were added to the project.The project has been implemented during 3 academic years (2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21) with the actual execution of 33 mobilities out of the 44 offered in up to 10 calls:- 27 undergraduate students (9 outgoing and 18 incoming).- 4 PhD students (all incoming)- 2 professors (1 outgoing and 1 incoming).Unfortunately, we have not been able to carry out all the mobilities initially planned. The global pandemic of COVID-19 that started at the beginning of 2020 forced us to suspend most of the mobilities that were still pending (specifically, we had 11 cancellations due to COVID-19 among PDI, PAS and PHD), and has significantly affected those that took place during the pandemic.Regarding the results and impact obtained, it is worth highlighting that the participants have seen their personal skills and competences improve, thanks to the immersion in a different academic and cultural environment.The direct knowledge of other teaching and learning methodologies has contributed to broadening their intercultural and linguistic competences, while at the same time serving to explore new ways of institutional collaboration and the design of joint teaching and research programmes.The students, for their part, in addition to obtaining recognition of the credits passed, have been able to internationalize their academic curriculum, with a view to their insertion in an increasingly global labour market.

Fast-paced advancements of hardware and machine-learning algorithms have triggered successful applications of active flow control, even though mainly limited to laboratory-scale applications. One of the main limits resides in the lesson we are able to learn today from experiments. We can successfully train actuators with probes in a controlled environment to reach a certain goal, e.g. aerodynamic drag minimization or noise reduction; on the other hand, an experimental technique that provides a full description of the flow is not available, thus generalization of the actuation effects to real applications is often prohibitive. The objective of NEXTFLOW is to conceive the next-generation flow-diagnostics aimed to flow control by leveraging the principles of completeness and compactness of the measurements. Completeness implies aiming to pursue a complete flow description, i.e. a time-resolved 3D characterization of velocity and thermodynamic variables. This will be achieved through a technique-integration approach based on data-driven methods. This grounds its basis on the principle that the superposed application of techniques is superior to their separate use. Compactness is pursued by exploring solutions with minimum technological complexity, and on developing new data output formats that are directly aimed at flow control applications. Key enablers for this task are (i) the novel concepts I recently proposed on data-driven techniques integration, (ii) the deep embedding of compressed-sensing methods in the data processing and (iii) the data-driven discovery of simplified governing equations of the dynamics. The next-generation flow diagnostics concept will deeply change experimental fluid mechanics and flow control, allowing bridging the gap between the laboratory experiment to the real application, with tremendous potential impact on numerous industrial applications.

It is expected that in the coming decades the population living in urban areas will increase dramatically. Therefore, the sustainability of our planet depends critically on a smart and energy-efficient operation of cities. Wireless communication technologies arise as one of the main enablers to reach this goal. For example, services and applications such as intelligent transportation, industry automation, and mobile healthcare will require to accommodate a vast number of heterogeneous and battery-limited wireless devices connecting asynchronously and sporadically to the network. This is commonly known as the massive connectivity problem. Since traditional wireless communication technologies were not designed to support this kind of services and applications, there is a need for a profound theoretical study of this problem. The main objective of MASCOT is to characterize, from an information-theoretic perspective, the fundamental limits and tradeoffs of the asynchronous massive connectivity problem. To this end, I will derive in the outgoing phase at MIT nonasymptotic bounds and asymptotic expansions characterizing these limits. In the return phase at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, I will then explore different strategies to efficiently and accurately compute the nonasymptotic bounds derived at MIT. During the course of the project, I will elaborate guidelines about how future wireless communication schemes must be designed, and I will adapt existing schemes according to these guidelines. The proposed training activities during the fellowship are fundamental for the correct achievements of MASCOT as well as to secure my future career goals. MASCOT guarantees a two-way transfer of knowledge since it combines my past expertise on elaborating and efficiently evaluating fundamental limits of low-latency wireless communications with the supervisors’ expertise on information theory applied to the massive connectivity problem and asynchronous communications.

The skin is the widest organ of the human body. Despite this, the mechanisms that underline its regulation are relatively poorly understood. Many skin diseases are characterized by defects in the control of lining renewal or reestablishing barrier integrity after the disruption. Thus, dissecting the signals that underpin the maintenance of skin homeostasis and regeneration are of pivotal interest for medicine. Recently, redox signaling as described to have a crucial role in these processes: indeed, H2O2 -the major signaling molecule of redox biology- is not only an essential second messenger, involved in skin proliferative and survival pathways but also it is reported that mild ER stress cursing with an increase in organelle redox potential is needed for efficient reepithelization. Recently, we have shown the presence of different ER-linked H2O2 fluxes that orchestrate cellular redox responses in normal conditions and after the induction of ER stress in HeLa cell lines. In this scenario, I propose to unveil the compartment-specific H2O2 fluxes that regulate the redoxstasis during keratinocytes differentiation with particular emphasis on those that arrive from the Endoplasmic Reticulum (ER). Indeed, the ER is one of the major contributors to cellular redoxstasis harboring sources, internal regulators, and distributors that vehicle redox signals back and forth to the ER. In particular, I divide this project into two main aims I) Characterize the role of intracellular redox fluxes during keratinocytes differentiation both in 2D and in 3D models II) Identify the interactors of ER-derived H2O2 flux in skin cell lines and characterize the downstream pathways. Importantly, a systematic analysis of the timing, thresholds, and targets of redox signals in skin pathways is a paramount gap in the field that has not yet been tackled, and thus constitutes the principal aim that this project wants to undertake.

The proposed 24-month fellowship aims to reintegrate the researcher, Dr. Carlos Romero Villarreal, in Europe after 3.5 years in New Zealand. He will address the feasibility of using powder metallurgy (PM) approaches and coatings to process highly efficient, lightweight bipolar plates (BP) for PEM fuel cells (FC) based on porous flow fields. This fellowship will be carried out in the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), in Spain, under the supervision of Professor Elena Gordo Odériz. As part of this, the researcher will carry out a 6-month secondment in ArcelorMittal, the world’s leading steel manufacturer, under the co-supervision of Dr. Domínguez and Dr. Botas. The scientific objective of the proposal is to develop materials for metallic BP based on porous flow fields that have low density in order to reduce considerably the weight of PEMFCs while keeping a high performance, to increase the energy efficiency of transportation systems. This contributes to key EU and UN objectives like low-carbon and climate-neutral economies. The low-density candidate materials are titanium and Ti-based MAX phases, which have good mechanical and conductive properties. These materials will be processed using PM techniques that allow the fabrication of dense and porous materials. To improve their performance, corrosion-resistant and electrically-conductive coatings based on TiN and graphene will be developed. The mechanical, conductive and corrosion properties of these materials will be characterised to assess if they achieve the PEMFC target properties. Along with the training in the relevant scientific skills, this proposal also has the objective to establish Dr. Romero as an independent researcher by training in several transferable skills key for academic and industrial environments such as leadership, teaching and supervision, project management, IPR and knowledge transfer and scientific communication (especially to non-specialist audiences).