We are pleased to announce that Dr. André Furtado has won the Applied Sciences 2023 Early Career Investigator Award.  As the winner, he will receive an honorarium of CHF 1000, an offer to publish one paper free of charge in Applied Sciences (ISSN: 2076-3417) after peer review before the end of 2024, and an electronic certificate.

Dr. André Furtado (World’s Top 2% Scientists list across all fields in 2021, according to scientists from Stanford University) is an Assistant Professor of structural engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal. Dr. André Furtado’s research interests focus on seismic engineering, structural engineering, experimental testing, numerical modeling, masonry infill walls, reinforced concrete structures, seismic vulnerability assessment, and retrofitting. Dr. André Furtado received his Ph.D. in 2020 and has an outstanding publication record, comprising over seven publications in peer-reviewed international journals in the last two years. Dr. André Furtado’s Scopus Scientific Citations number is 1553 and his Hirsch index is 24. He is a rising star in the field of structural engineering.

The following is a short interview with the winner Dr. André Furtado:

My name is André Furtado, and I’m working right now as an Assistant Professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon. So, my expertise is related to the seismic behavior of reinforced concrete structures, particularly the interaction between reinforced concrete structures and masonry infill walls. I also have another focus on my investigation–the seismic behavior of precast concrete structures.

Try to be original and believe in your capacity. Sometimes it's not easy, and one of the things that I was wondering about during my early research career was being original and trying to put all my imagination into my papers, develop new things, and try not to copy other existing works, but instead of that, take a good inspiration from them and do different things. Also, since we are currently in a very competitive research environment, my best recommendation is to be persistent, resilient, and ambitious, believe in your skills, and learn to work as a team with colleagues.

I think that these types of awards for young investigators are very important because they are usually targeted at senior investigators and somehow this is a recognition that the young investigators who have made huge efforts to be recognized by the scientific community can also make impactful research activities despite their shorter careers. I believe that these types of awards will stimulate many more outstanding early career investigators to improve their research and increase their impact on science and society. I also believe that this will stimulate many other early career investigators in the future to apply for this award. The journal can support the academic community by being more active in conferences and trying to have meetings with the authors or the Editorial Board Members to strengthen collaborations. Another thing that I would like to suggest, and I believe that you have started already, is to start with some webinars with specialists where you can be associated. Imagine that applied sciences are associated with a series of webinars related to earthquake engineering. This can be useful.

One of the things you could do is focus on gender equality. Of course, there are some fields where there is an unbalanced number of genders, but the distinction with awards for all genders will stimulate the attention of all genders, attract more young researchers, and the results will be fruitful. Not only in my case for structural engineering, but I believe for other disciplines.

For more information about the journal awards, please click on the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci/awards.