Strategic planning of electricity systems: Integrating renewable energies

Tese de Doutoramento - Programa Doutoral em Engenharia Industrial e Sistemas (PDEIS)

Impact of mutated KRAS signalling on autophagy regulation in colorectal carcinoma

Programa Doutoral em Biologia Molecular e Ambiental

Redes interorganizacionais nas políticas públicas: atores, conexões e configurações organizacionais

Tese de Doutoramento em Sociologia

Measuring university-to-work success: development of a new scale

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a subjective multidimensional measure of early career success during university-to-work transition. Design/methodology/approach – The construct of university-to-work success (UWS) was defined in terms of intrinsic and extrinsic career outcomes, and a three-stage study was conducted to create a new scale. Findings – A preliminary set of items was developed and tested by judges. Results showed the items had good content validity. Factor analyses indicated a four-factor structure and a second-order model with subscales to assess: career insertion and satisfaction, confidence in career future, income and financial independence, and adaptation to work. Third, the authors sought to confirm the hypothesized model examining the comparative fit of the scale and two alternative models. Results showed that fits for both the first- and second-order models were acceptable. Research limitations/implications – The proposed model has sound psychometric qualities, although the validated version of the scale was not able to incorporate all constructs envisaged by the initial theoretical model. Results indicated some direction for further refinement. Practical implications – The scale could be used as a tool for self-assessment or as an outcome measure to assess the efficacy of university-to-work programs in applied settings. Originality/value – This study provides a useful single measure to assess early career success during the university-to-work transition, and might facilitate testing of causal models which could help identify factors relevant for successful transition.

Employment, turnover and career progress

The severe economic downturn that followed the Global Financial Crisis of 2007 was accompanied by major fluctuations in the labour market. During the Great Recession the rate of job destruction was such that, by 2013, active population was at levels of 1999; employment levels were at an historical minimum; and the unemployment rate soared to 17,5%. This chapter inspects the dynamics behind the aggregate fl uctuations in the labour market and studies the determinants of mobility within (promotions) and between fi rms, and whether these have changed during crisis, using Portuguese (LEED) data. During crisis women became more likely to make between- rm moves with short gaps of unemployment and less likely to find a new job after a long gap or to make a job-to-non-employment transition. More educated workers are less likely to experience between fi rm job mobility, both before and during crisis, and became less likely to make job-to-non-employment transitions during crisis. Young workers are the group that most suffered from crisis: they became less likely to make job-to-job transitions and their hazard of experiencing a transition into unemployment shoot up.

Exploring the potentialities of a new type of CFRP laminate for the simultaneous flexural and shear strengthening of RC beams: numerical research

This study aims to develop an innovative carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) laminate with a U configuration to address strengthening interventions, where the increment of both flexural and shear capacity of reinforced concrete (RC) elements is required. This strengthening solution combines the near surface mounted (NSM) and embedded through section (ETS) techniques in the same application, since these techniques have already evidenced high performance on flexural and shear strengthening of RC beams using FRP systems, respectively. In fact, the proposed hybrid technique aims to mobilize the advantages provided by these two strengthening techniques by using an innovative CFRP laminate. The strengthening efficacy of this new hybrid NSM/ETS technique was numerically assessed and compared to the corresponding efficiency of NSM and ETS techniques applied separately for the flexural and shear strengthening of RC beams, respectively. The numerical models are described and the main relevant results are presented and discussed.

Implementation of integral viscoelastic constitutive models in OpenFOAM® computational library

This work reports the implementation and verification of a new so lver in OpenFOAM® open source computational library, able to cope with integral viscoelastic models based on the integral upper-convected Maxwell model. The code is verified through the comparison of its predictions with analytical solutions and numerical results obtained with the differential upper-convected Maxwell model

Modeling microbes: New methods for integrated metabolic and regulatory network reconstruction

PhD Thesis in Bioengineering

A new integral viscoelastic flow solver in OpenFOAM®

The usual high cost of commercial codes, and some technical limitations, clearly limits the employment of numerical modelling tools in both industry and academia. Consequently, the number of companies that use numerical code is limited and there a lot of effort put on the development and maintenance of in-house academic based codes . Having in mind the potential of using numerical modelling tools as a design aid, of both products and processes, different research teams have been contributing to the development of open source codes/libraries. In this framework, any individual can take advantage of the available code capabilities and/or implement additional features based on his specific needs. These type of codes are usually developed by large communities, which provide improvements and new features in their specific fields of research, thus increasing significantly the code development process. Among others, OpenFOAM® multi-physics computational library, developed by a very large and dynamic community, nowadays comprises several features usually only available in their commercial counterparts; e.g. dynamic meshes, large diversity of complex physical models, parallelization, multiphase models, to name just a few. This computational library is developed in C++ and makes use of most of all language capabilities to facilitate the implementation of new functionalities. Concerning the field of computational rheology, OpenFOAM® solvers were recently developed to deal with the most relevant differential viscoelastic rheological models, and stabilization techniques are currently being verified. This work describes the implementation of a new solver in OpenFOAM® library, able to cope with integral viscoelastic models based on the deformation field method. The implemented solver is verified through the comparison of the predicted results with analytical solutions, results published in the literature and by using the Method of Manufactured Solutions

Search for new phenomena in events with a photon and missing transverse momentum in pp collisions at s√=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Results of a search for new phenomena in events with an energetic photon and large missing transverse momentum with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC are reported. Data were collected in proton--proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb−1. The observed data are well described by the expected Standard Model backgrounds. The expected (observed) upper limit on the fiducial cross section for the production of such events is 6.1 (5.3) fb at 95% confidence level. Exclusion limits are presented on models of new phenomena with large extra spatial dimensions, supersymmetric quarks, and direct pair production of dark-matter candidates.

Search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum in pp collisions at s√=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Results of a search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum are reported. The search uses 20.3 fb−1 of s√=8 TeV data collected in 2012 with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Events are required to have at least one jet with pT>120 GeV and no leptons. Nine signal regions are considered with increasing missing transverse momentum requirements between EmissT>150 GeV and EmissT>700 GeV. Good agreement is observed between the number of events in data and Standard Model expectations. The results are translated into exclusion limits on models with large extra spatial dimensions, pair production of weakly interacting dark matter candidates, and production of very light gravitinos in a gauge-mediated supersymmetric model. In addition, limits on the production of an invisibly decaying Higgs-like boson leading to similar topologies in the final state are presented.

Honours students: good marks and what else?

Currently in Portugal academic excellence in higher education is given recognition through merit prizes. Because honours students can be seen as having the potential to achieve imporant levels of professional expertise, especially if they have some personal skills, it is important to know not only the marks of the students but also the personal characteristics that contribute to academic success and which may also be important for career success. Some theoretical models of giftedness and excellence agree with this idea and this work considers the latest contribution of Renzulli (2005) where it is pointed out that excellent achievements result from the combination of motivational, intellectual and creative factors as well as from co-cognitive factors which are most associated with personality functioning in a particular context. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze how honours students differ from their classmates in various psychological dimensions: Cognition-creativity, Motivation and Learning Strategies, Persistence, Social Interaction, Drive for Excellence and Cultural Interest. These dimensions were measured by the Inventory of Psychological Characteristics Associated with Academic Performance (ICPADA), which was constructed taking into consideration the previous study of Scaeger et al. (2012). The sample included 914 Portuguese higher educatoin students from a first cycle degree in the Bologna process. Participants were selected from three different fields of study: Social and Human Sciences; Science and Technology; Arts and Humanities. The data collected through the administration of the ICPADA was presented, and the results revealed a higher self-perception by honours students in all areas analyzed, with the exception of the dimension of social interaction. In addition an interaction effect was revealed for persistence, social interaction, and cultural interest. The field of study and whether the participants were honours students or not were also taken into account. Some implications for future studies are presented here along with possible interventions for honours students.

Exploring the role of O-Mannosylation in the modulation of E-Cadherin function in Gastric Cancer cell line models

Dissertação de mestrado em Bioquímica Aplicada – Biomedicina

Constraints on new phenomena via Higgs boson couplings and invisible decays with the ATLAS detector

The ATLAS experiment at the LHC has measured the Higgs boson couplings and mass, and searched for invisible Higgs boson decays, using multiple production and decay channels with up to 4.7 fb−1 of pp collision data at √s=7 TeV and 20.3 fb−1 at √s=8 TeV. In the current study, the measured production and decay rates of the observed Higgs boson in the γγ, ZZ, W W , Zγ, bb, τ τ , and μμ decay channels, along with results from the associated production of a Higgs boson with a top-quark pair, are used to probe the scaling of the couplings with mass. Limits are set on parameters in extensions of the Standard Model including a composite Higgs boson, an additional electroweak singlet, and two-Higgs-doublet models. Together with the measured mass of the scalar Higgs boson in the γγ and ZZ decay modes, a lower limit is set on the pseudoscalar Higgs boson mass of m A > 370 GeV in the “hMSSM” simplified Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. Results from direct searches for heavy Higgs bosons are also interpreted in the hMSSM. Direct searches for invisible Higgs boson decays in the vector-boson fusion and associated production of a Higgs boson with W/Z (Z → ℓℓ, W/Z → jj) modes are statistically combined to set an upper limit on the Higgs boson invisible branching ratio of 0.25. The use of the measured visible decay rates in a more general coupling fit improves the upper limit to 0.23, constraining a Higgs portal model of dark matter.

Search for new phenomena in events with three or more charged leptons in pp collisions at TeV with the ATLAS detector

A generic search for anomalous production of events with at least three charged leptons is presented. The data sample consists of pp collisions at s√=8 TeV collected in 2012 by the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb−1. Events are required to have at least three selected lepton candidates, at least two of which must be electrons or muons, while the third may be a hadronically decaying tau. Selected events are categorized based on their lepton flavour content and signal regions are constructed using several kinematic variables of interest. No significant deviations from Standard Model predictions are observed. Model-independent upper limits on contributions from beyond the Standard Model phenomena are provided for each signal region, along with prescription to re-interpret the limits for any model. Constraints are also placed on models predicting doubly charged Higgs bosons and excited leptons. For doubly charged Higgs bosons decaying to eτ or μτ, lower limits on the mass are set at 400 GeV at 95% confidence level. For excited leptons, constraints are provided as functions of both the mass of the excited state and the compositeness scale Λ, with the strongest mass constraints arising in regions where the mass equals Λ. In such scenarios, lower mass limits are set at 3.0 TeV for excited electrons and muons, 2.5 TeV for excited taus, and 1.6 TeV for every excited-neutrino flavour.