Gabriel Cathoud

My name is Gabriel Cathoud, and I am 22 years old. I was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and in 2018 I moved to Portugal to study Chemical Engineering at the University of Coimbra. I am a very curious person, and I like to learn about everything, from culture and arts to languages, science, and engineering.

During the three years of my bachelor’s degree, I tried to seize all the opportunities that the university could offer me. In the first year, I focused on languages and learned French and German. I also improved my English. 

In the second year, I dedicated myself to my soft skills and I founded together with other colleagues Solve, a junior enterprise that aims to bring the practice of the professional environment to students.

In the last year of my bachelor’s, I dedicated myself to my hard skills and did two internships: the first related to materials engineering, in which I worked with Professor Luísa Durães and synthesized aerogels; and the second related to computational fluid dynamics, in which I worked with Professor Nuno Oliveira and simulated the behavior of some unit operations in chemical engineering.

My experiences during my undergraduate years were very rich and I learned a lot. Despite challenging myself with extracurricular activities, I still managed to maintain good grades and received a merit scholarship for three consecutive years.

What are my research interests?

With the many experiences I had during my bachelor’s degree, I could converge my interests gradually. In the internship about aerogels the goal was to develop thermal insulation for spaceships. Although the theme seemed very interesting to me, I realized during my days in the lab that I was much more captivated by computers than in Beakers and Erlenmeyers.

Numerical calculus, optimization, modeling, and simulation were areas that I always had the most interest in. Either on the molecular scale or the macro scale, I like to model physical and chemical systems. Therefore, my interests are in finite element method techniques, Multiphysics modeling, molecular mechanics, dynamics, etc.

What are my goals?

Recently, I became very interested in product design and developing new products. More specifically, I am very interested in specializing in the development of new pharmaceuticals using the computer. Due to some courses I attended in chemical engineering and some projects I participated in, I was impressed by the area of modeling molecules using the computer.

As a person who wants to make a difference and who wants to have an impact on humanity, I believe that molecular engineering will help me achieve these goals. With molecule engineering, it is possible to discover new drugs that can cure diseases. It can also be used to develop new proteins that can be used, for example, to treat waste and make human action less harmful to the environment. Computational tools related to molecular engineering have shown great potential in chemical engineering, food engineering, drug engineering, and other areas, and they are certainly the future. That’s why I want to become an expert in these tools.

What are my expectations about the summer of HPC?

Since I want to work in the area, my greatest expectation is to learn as much as I can. I will be working on the project Neural networks in chemistry, which is about developing a method to identify potential drugs to be used against COVID-19. I am interested in further developing my skills in artificial intelligence, deep learning, and neural networks. I want to become an expert in the latest tools involving artificial intelligence for the development of new drugs. I also want to get experience in working with clusters and with high-performance computing. This is a new area for me, so the most I learn, the better.