Roger Bock Filella was born in Terrassa in 2000. In 2022, he graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Telecommunications Technologies and Services Engineering from the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Enginyeria de Telecomunicacions de Barcelona (ETSETB) at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).
During his senior year, he undertook his bachelor’s thesis in the Division of Electromagnetics Engineering at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (Sweden), in the framework of an Erasmus exchange program. He worked on the design of a leaky-wave antenna featuring fast frequency scanning with potential use for imaging systems.
Afterwards, he pursued an MSc in Telecommunications Engineering at ETSETB, UPC. Parallel to his studies, Roger worked as a radio frequency and microwave engineer intern at Sener Aerospacial, where he was responsible for the design and test of passive and active circuits for space applications. During his internship, he was granted an ESA Education Scholarship to attend the first edition of the Satellite Microwave and Remote Sensing course held at the European Space Research and Technology Center (ESTEC) in Noordwijk (The Netherlands). In the last semester of his master’s degree, he was awarded a Balsells Mobility Fellowship to carry out his master’s thesis under the supervision of Professor Franco de Flaviis at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He conducted his research on the development of an antenna based on gap waveguide technology for a 5G smart repeater.
After obtaining his master’s degree in 2024, Roger received a Balsells Graduate Fellowship to pursue his PhD in Electrical Engineering at UCI. His research interests include radio frequency and microwave circuits, antennas and computational electromagnetics. In his spare time, Roger enjoys playing basketball, spending time in nature and playing board games.
Oriol Vendrell Gallart was born in Ordal (Barcelona) in 1997. He received a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Escola Tècnica Superior d’Enginyeria Industrial de Barcelona at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in 2019 and he obtained an M.S. Degree in Robotics and Automatic Control at the same university in 2022.
During his undergraduate studies, he was a research intern at Mobile Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab at Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (IRI), where he worked on autonomous systems and state estimation for aerial navigation problems. During his M.S. he was a research assistant at the Manufacturing Technologies Group at UPC, where he developed 3D-printed soft sensors to control mobility assistance devices.
In 2019, he joined HP as an R&D Software Engineer in the 3D Printing SW group, where he worked in several distributed cloud computing systems and 3D machine learning pipelines for digital manufacturing. Prior to joining UCI, he held a Senior Software Engineer position as the architect for a newly introduced physics simulation solution for metals 3D Printing. He collaborated with HP Research Labs in geometric deep learning problems and physical-AI to advance new computational methods for scientific simulation.
In 2024, he was awarded a Balsells Graduate Fellowship to pursue his PhD in Machine Learning at the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at University of California Irvine (UCI). His main research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and computational science to address scientific, engineering and robotics challenges.
In his spare time, you will find Oriol enjoying nature, the sea, traveling, cooking, hanging out with friends, going to the gym and practicing sports like soccer, tennis and pickleball.