Dear Colleagues,

As Editor-in-Chief of Designs, I am pleased to announce the winners of the Designs Travel Award for 2019. The 2019 Designs Travel Award has been granted to Mr. Miel Sharf and Mr. Leo de Waal.

Mr. Miel Sharf is a Ph.D. student from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. He will receive 300 CHF to help support travel to attend the IEEE CDC 2019 conference in Nice, France in December.

Mr. Miel Sharf current research interests can be trisected into basic questions related to passivity and energy-based nonlinear control, designing secure multi-agent systems, which are not susceptible to faults and malicious attacks, and designing data-driven algorithms which regulate networks without the need for an exact model for the network’s operation.

Mr. Leo de Waal is a D.Phil student within the Special Structures Group at the University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. He will receive 300 CHF to help support travel to attend the ASME 2019 IDETC/CIE Conference in California, USA in August.

Mr. Leo de Waal now focuses on geometry, specifically how geometry can be implemented to create superior energy absorption devices. Using origami techniques, he has proposed a novel tube which can be graded to provide a tunable stiffness throughout the crushing process. The ability to create a 3D structure from a 2D sheet alleviates many of the manufacturing difficulties associated with manufacturing functionally graded structures.

It was a difficult decision with such high-quality applications for the award and we would like to thank all applicants for submitting their diverse and fascinating range of research topics. On behalf of the assessment committee, I congratulate the winners for their accomplishments.

Editor-in-Chief
Prof. Dr. Hamid Reza Karimi

Designs (ISSN 2411-9660) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal, published quarterly by MDPI.

The competition for the 2020 Designs Travel Award will be open for applications this September. Please check http://www.mdpi.com/journal/designs for more information closer to this date.