Portuguese IBM Scientific Prize Awarded

The IBM Scientific Prize 2010 was recently presented to Alexandra Silva, for her PhD research at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam. Her paper is titled Quantitative Kleene coalgebras.

Silva received the prize during a ceremony in Braga, Portugal, with Education and Science Minister Nuno Crato and IBM Portugal President Jose Joaquim de Oliveira. The award consists of a charter and 15,000 EURO prize.

A copy of her presentation can be downloaded here.

Silva is currently working as an assistant professor at Radboud University Nijmegen and as a research visitor at CWI in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Established in 1990 the IBM Scientific Prize is the most important Portuguese award for high scientific merits in computer science and is meant for researchers younger than 36 years.  This year also marks the first time a woman has been recognized.

Alexandra Silva finished a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Minho (UMinho). Being a PhD student at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Foundations of Software Engineering (SEN3) research group, she defended her thesis ‘Kleene Cooalgebra’ at the Radboud University Nijmegen (RUN) in 2010, passing ‘cum laude’. She was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in the HASLab group at UMinho and also won a contest to become Assistant Professor in Nijmegen. In the past, she was also research visitor at Cornell University, and post-doctoral researcher at CWI.

Source: UMinho Portugal and CWI