Mariana de Melo Antunes, a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Mechanical Engineering (PPG-EME) at the Federal University of Itajubá (UNIFEI), where she also earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering, received the Biot–Fourier Award (Figure 1) during the annual conference of the French Society of Thermal Sciences (SFT), held in Nancy, France, from June 2 to 6, 2026. More information is available at https://www.sft.asso.fr/.
The award recognizes the best overall contribution presented at the conference, based on the combined evaluation of the scientific paper, poster, and oral presentation. Mariana competed against five other PhD students and postdoctoral researchers who had been previously selected by the SFT Scientific Committee from among the 74 papers accepted for the event.
Her presentation, entitled “Identification of a Reduced-Order Model and Unknown Thermal Input for 3D Thermal Field Reconstruction in Thermal Ablation Procedures” (Figure 2), is part of a French-German research project developed through a collaboration between the Institute of Mechanics and Engineering of Bordeaux (I2M), the Center for Magnetic Resonance of Biological Systems (CRMSB) at Bordeaux University Hospital, and the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) University Hospital in Munich.
The research has gained increasing recognition in recent years and had previously been featured by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) as one of the country’s engineering highlights.
Mariana is supervised by Professor Sandro Metrevelle Marcondes de Lima e Silva (UNIFEI) and co-supervised by Professor Jean-Luc Battaglia, researcher at the Institut de Mécanique et d’Ingénierie (I2M – CNRS / Université de Bordeaux).
The success of her work further strengthens the internationalization of PPG-EME and the Heat Transfer Laboratory (LabTC/IEM/UNIFEI). In addition to consolidating UNIFEI’s position as a reference in the production of globally impactful scientific knowledge, this achievement highlights the importance of scientific collaboration between Brazil and France in the field of heat transfer applied to healthcare.
