This partnership gives engineering programme students the exceptional opportunity to obtain a French PhD from Centrale Nantes and an American PhD from Stevens Institute of Technology.
This partnership with Stevens Institute of Technology is an additional tool to help promote PhD studies among engineering students. Centrale Nantes' ambition is to develop a genuine knowledge and skills-based society that enables young graduates to meet the needs expressed by the socio-economic world and the academic world.
This exceptional programme is designed for all Centrale Nantes students who are interested in research and innovation, who plan to work in deeptech and/or who wish to further their careers in an international environment.
In 2024/2025, 3 students commenced the 4-year double PhD programme starting at Stevens Institute of Technology.
My thesis focuses on the study of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. Having understood how an OCT works, I'm now looking at how to characterise image noise. Ultimately, the aim is to be able to determine which elements are visible in an OCT image, based on their texture. Within the laboratory, we have a weekly meeting with the other PhD students/post-docs and a monthly videoconference with my advisors in Nantes and my advisor in Stevens.
There are 3 other PhD students/post-docs in the lab where I work, and their subjects are more focused on biology and less on signal processing. We have 2 rooms, one of which is an open space (shared with another lab), and a lab in which the tomograph is located. The lab has a computer with 3D modelling software.
My thesis is about reduced order models for solving parametric differential equations. The aim is to recover the key information of a system of equations so that it can be solved in a smaller volume, thereby reducing the calculation time. For the moment, I have studied a number of articles presenting methods related to this topic. So far, I've worked with my various supervisors (from Stevens and Centrale Nantes) in such a way that I am building up a theoretical foundation in order to increase my knowledge of a specific subject (most recently Dynamical Low-Rank Approximation). Then I programme the method numerically with the idea of reproducing the behaviour presented in the articles. This will gradually give me a ‘library’ of methods at my disposal.
My PhD work at Stevens consists in developing numerical tools and experimenting with simulation, before moving on to real systems. During my first semester, I was able to implement a 3D map generator to deploy cohorts of robot explorers, based on one of my own ideas. I work in a team of around ten people specialising in autonomous robotics, SLAM and data collection. Within the laboratory, we have our own workspace equipped with computer hardware and manufacturing tools (workshop, 3D printers).
