Interview with Dr. Kerlos Atia Abdalmalak Dawoud—Winner of the Symmetry 2024 Travel Award
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Kerlos Atia Abdalmalak Dawoud, a postdoctoral researcher at Carlos III Universidad de Madrid, Spain, has won the Symmetry 2024 Travel Award. As the winner, he will receive an honorarium of CHF 800 and an electronic certificate.
Dr. Abdalmalak Dawoud is a postdoctoral researcher covered by the Margarita Salas grant (financed by the European Union—Next Generation EU) in the GREMA Group (Radiofrequency, Electromagnetism, Microwaves and Antennas Group) at Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain. He received his B.Sc. with honors (ranked second out of all his colleagues) in communication engineering from Aswan University, Egypt, in 2011; then, he joined the department of electrical engineering at Aswan University as a teaching assistant. He received his M.Sc. degree (with an excellent grade) in multimedia and communication from Carlos III University of Madrid in 2015, and then a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Signal Theory and Communications in the field of antennas and radiometers for radio-astronomy applications in 2022 (with an excellent grade and cum laude/international mentions). Dr. Abdalmalak Dawoud has received several prestigious awards, such as the Erasmus Mundus Green IT grant in 2014, the Young Scientists' Award (second prize) from URSI Spain in 2017, the best Ph.D. thesis in the field of aerospace from Ayuntamiento de Madrid in 2022, the outstanding Ph.D. thesis award from UC3M in 2023, second rank for Premio Atlantic for the best Ph.D. thesis in telecommunications in Spain in 2023, and the IEEE AP-S Postdoc Fellowship in 2023.
The following text comprises a short Q&A with Dr. Abdalmalak Dawoud, who shared his vision for the journal with us as well as his views on the research area and open access publishing:
1. Congratulations on winning the Symmetry 2024 Travel Awards! How do you feel about winning the award?
I received invitations to apply for awards from other MDPI journals, and then I started searching for awards from all MDPI journals. Considering that I was planning to attend the international conference in Italy in July this year, the 2024 IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and ITNC-USNC-URSI Radio Science Meeting, I thought it was very suitable to promote the journal Symmetry, so I tried to apply for the travel award of Symmetry. I did not think that I would win the prize because it is very challenging and, as far as I know, there are many competitors who applied for the same prize. Anyway, I am very happy that I won.
2. Could you please briefly introduce your current research work?
My research topics cover a wide range of antenna and radio frequency applications including ultrawideband antenna design, radioastronomy receivers, satellite Earth observation, mm-wave/THz technologies, 5G technology, and photonic nonlinear up-conversion.
3. Symmetry is an open access (OA) journal. What do you think is the impact of OA on authors?
OA is very important for researchers, as it is open for everyone and people do not have to pay to get access to other papers to do research; in my opinion, OA publishing is much better. For funding, as I know, some universities have agreements with the publishers and receive some discounts.
4. What do you think about journal awards?
Granting different types of awards is a really good method to involve people in the journal and to increase our visibility.
5. Do you have any thoughts on how the promotion of the journal at conferences could be more effective?
Having booths at international conferences and maintaining the method with sponsorships for awards.
Once more, congratulations to Dr. Kerlos Atia Abdalmalak Dawoud. We would also like to thank all the applicants for submitting their diverse and fascinating research topics.
For more information about the journal awards, please click on the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/symmetry/awards.