Thin-Films for Machining Difficult-to-Cut Materials

Ch Sateesh Kumar completed his PhD at the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, India. He worked as Visiting Assistant Professor at the Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, India. Later he joined the Advanced Materials Group at the Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic as Postdoctoral Researcher. Presently he is working as a Senior Researcher at the Aeronautics Advanced Manufacturing Centre, Bilbao, Spain in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Madanapalle Institute of Technology and Science, India. Also, he is working as a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Technology, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His research interests include machining, surface modification techniques, coating deposition and characterization, and tribology. He has published 21 research articles in highly reputed journals and also presented his work at seven renowned conferences. As per Google Scholar, his h-index and i10-index are 10. He has also extended his services as a reviewer in many reputed journals.

Filipe Daniel Fernandes is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Engineering at the Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal. In parallel, he integrated the body researcher group of IPN - Instituto Pedro Nunes, where he collaborated in the planning, preparation, and submission of project proposals to different funding entities. He is also a collaborator at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. In 2017 he was awarded a postdoc grant from FCT (SFRH/BPD/116334/2016) having as host institution the University of Minho, Portugal, where he improved the machinability of Ti alloys through the development of novel physical vapor deposition (PVD) films. He was placed in first place among 68 candidates. His work was recognized at the International Conference on Plasma Surface Engineering (Early Career Award 2018), perhaps the most known international conference on surface engineering held in Europe. In 2019 he won the prestigious Marie Curie fellowship and joined the Advanced Materials group at the Czech Technical University in Prague. Since 2010, Filipe Fernandes published 52 articles in international journals, being the first author in 17 of them (one as sole author) and in 21 manuscripts as the last author (four in in-press condition), showing a strong level leadership of his small group (currently one postdoc and one PhD; and one PhD already defended). According to Scopus, currently his h-index is 15 with a total of 607 citations. He is/was a member of the advisor committee/scientific commission of conferences, member of evaluation committees of research projects, member of scientific societies, member of the editorial board of scientific journals, and member organizer of seminars for high school students and graduate researchers. He participated in several national and European research projects; he is currently the PI of the MCTool21 project at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He supervised and is supervising PhD and master's students. He was a jury member Jury for PhD and master's theses. This year he became a father.