Several professors from Tecnun have taken advantage of the summer to spend a stay at a foreign university. Two of them, Álvaro Lleó and Jorge Aramburu, tell us about their experience. The rest will soon follow, in a second submission of this report.  

Álvaro Lleó is a professor at department of Industrial Organization of Tecnun and has spent 4 months in Boston (USA). During this time he has worked at Bentley University, together with two professors of that center. Lleó has taken advantage of his stay in Boston to deepen in statistical techniques to validate behavioral models. "And I have also been able to work on several publications of the projects we are working on". 

Specifically, he has submitted two articles to impact journals and has started working on two more that he hopes to submit before the end of the year. In addition, he met Carlos Rey, director of the Chair of Mission Management at the UIC, "with whom we started collaborating a year ago and we have been able to work intensively on the next phases of project", explains Lleó, who has also invested part of his time in meeting professors from Harvard, MIT, Boston University and Babson College, with whom he has been able to share his research. "Let's see if any collaboration takes off," he ventures. 

For Lleó, the experience has been very positive. "I think that the mere fact of moving around Bentley's campus , knowing the Medialab or MIT Sloan, walking around Harvard Business School or going to work at Widener, is already very enriching. But, without a doubt, being able to work with people from there and have conversations with professors from the best universities in the world has been an unbeatable opportunity. There are very good people there who have very magnanimous approaches to research. They have given me very interesting feedback," explains the professor at Tecnun, who says he has seen similarities in the way the School of Engineering of the University of Navarra works with the leading American centers. "We both have very good students and we take great care in teaching". 

And, of course, during his stay Lleó has also had some anecdotes worth remembering. The most spectacular thing that happened to him was that he was able to give a class at MIT itself. "As you can imagine, being able to give class in one of the best universities in the world was very special, but it was almost better how they offered me to give that class". It was thanks to Jon García Urbieta, former student of Tecnun, who is now there working at the Space Propulsion Laboratory (SPL). From his 'lab' they organized a summer course, the students had to do a team project , he told them about Álvaro and... "they offered me to give a session on teamwork. I am very grateful to him. I think this is a clear example of what happens at Tecnun. When you take care of the relationships with the students, many opportunities come to you through them". 

And the second thing Lleó highlights was that he was able to meet there with Yago Lizarribar, Anuca López Orero and Jon Garcia Urbieta, three alumni of the Master's Degree in Industrial Engineering. "Seeing our students working at MIT and that they are doing well gives you a lot of satisfaction as a teacher". In addition, he was also able to spend a few days there with Dani Valderas and the three telecoms students(Fátima Villa, Iñigo Cortés and Álvaro Urain) who won a award in a competition organized by MIT. "We can already see that we have students who are capable of working with the best," says the professor. 

And the last one was to spend almost a month there with Andrés Felipe Muñoz (PhD student of his department) and his family. "During the time he has been in Tecnun we have become very good friends and being able to be with them in Boston for three weeks has been very nice. We had a good time there and ate good hamburgers together," he concludes amused.

Jorge Aramburu belongs to department of Mechanics and Materials of Tecnun and has been, and still is, in London. He has been there since January and will be there until the end of this month. Specifically, he is at department in Biomedical Engineering at King's College London.

His work consisted of developing a model of the cardiovascular system of Fontan patients using reduced-order hemodynamic models. That is, one-dimensional (1D) and "cerodimensional" models. Aramburu explains that Fontan patients are patients who were born with only one functional ventricle (resulting in hypoxemia, low oxygen levels in the blood) and have undergone a series of operations ending with the Fontan operation. 

Basically, the Fontan operation consists of directly "connecting" the superior vena cava and inferior vena cava to the pulmonary arteries. In this way, hypoxemia is improved. The Fontan circulation is a surgically created circulation and it is important to analyze whether the circulation is adequate or can be improved by pulmonary artery stenting, etc.

"To analyze the circulation we have developed a simple model , with few parameters, which provides the blood pressure and blood flow waves at various points of the circulation, and we have developed a methodology to estimate the parameters of the model. We have applied the methodology to a patient and the results look promising," notes Aramburu, who considers that the experience has been "very good both professionally and at staff".

On a professional level, he emphasizes two points. The first; having been able to work under the supervision of Dr. Jordi Alastruey has been "very enriching" for him because he is one of the researchers who has worked most with 1D models of hemodynamics. And secondly because "in this project we have worked with people not only from different backgrounds (doctors, engineers, etc.), but also from different nationalities", which has allowed him an important cultural and academic enrichment. At staff, the fact that at King's College London everyone can organize their schedule as they wish (to avoid rush hour on public transport, among other things) has allowed him to combine work and hobbies in a very particular way.

The similarity he has been able to find in that institution with respect to Tecnun is the collaboration they have with St Thomas' Hospital-King's College London, "it is similar to the collaboration we have between the Clinic and Tecnun, very important for us during the last years". Although, in London, they are all in the same building. 

In the department where Jorge is, where by the way the view is directly overlooking the London Eye and Big Ben, the way of working is as follows: "the department is composed of several professors, readers, senior lecturers and lecturers, and each one has its own research group, composed of the group leader, 1 or 2 post-docs and 3 or 4 PhD students. In that sense, there could be a similarity also with Tecnun, at least with the area of Thermal and Fluid Engineering where I work".

Finally, Jorge Aramburu has also enjoyed many funny and curious anecdotes. "London gives for a lot," he assures. "From the foxes you meet in the street at 3 a.m. (when I go to catch the 7 a.m. flight at Stansted), to the unintentional recklessness that three friends from Zarauza can commit on the roads of London with Banco Santander bicycles".