Lucian Popescu, PhD student in High-Performance Computing Architectures and Systems (HPCAS), and advised by Nuno Lopes, researcher in the same area, received the “La Caixa” Foundation Doctoral INPhINIT fellowship.

The exclusive fellowship is attributed to international students who wish to pursue doctoral studies in Portugal or Spain and is the first “La Caixa” fellowship to be secured by an INESC-ID student. “Typically only one or two of these fellowships are awarded per year to computer science (30 in total), which shows the degree of competitiveness.” highlights Nuno Lopes. “We were very surprised and happy with this Christmas gift! Thank you to La Caixa for funding national research.”

Lucian concluded his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest, in Romania, and is now starting his PhD in IST/INESC-ID. During his master’s he published an article “Exploiting Undefined Behavior in C/C++ Programs for Optimization: A Study on the Performance Impact” in the Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) 2025, the most relevant annual conference in the sector.