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Professor James F. Kurose’s laudatio was given by Albert Banchs, from UC3M’s Telematics Engineering Department, while Alain Molinari’s laudatio was given by Henar Miguélez, from UC3M’s Mechanical Engineering Department.

James F. Kurose is a Distinguished University Professor in the School of Information and Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Wesleyan University. He has been a visiting scientist at several institutions, such as IBM Research, INRIA, Technicolor,  Sorbonne University and the University of Paris. His lines of research include computer network architecture and protocols, sensor networks and multimedia communication and network measurement, among others. He has received several awards, including the IEEE Infocom Award, the ACM SICOMM Lifetime Achievement Award, the ACM Sigcomm Test of Time Award and the IEEE Computer Society Taylor Booth Education Medal. He has been deputy director of the US National Science Foundation and deputy director of Artificial Intelligence in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is a member of the IEEE, the ACM and the US National Academy of Engineering. In Madrid, he is a member of the board of trustees and the scientific committee of the IMDEA Networks institute.

Alain Molinari is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Solid Mechanics at the University of Lorraine. He has a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from the Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg and a PhD in Science from the University of Metz. He has been “Professeur chargé de cours” at the École Polytechnique in Paris and invited professor at foreign institutions such as the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the universities of California at San Diego, Brown and Johns Hopkins, among others. He has done research in various fields of Solid Mechanics, especially in the field of materials subjected to extreme conditions, such as very rapid deformation phenomena, high speed forming processes or multi-scale modelling of dynamic damage, among others. He has been associate editor of several scientific journals, such as 'International Journal of Plasticity' and 'Continuum Mechanics and Thermodynamics'. He has organised and participated in many international conferences and committees and is the author or co-author of some 250  research papers. Molinari has received several awards: he was Millikan Distinguished Professor at Caltech, Distinguished Scholar and Gledden Senior Fellow at the University of Western Australia, as well as receiving awards such as the Spiru Haret Award from the Romanian Academy of Sciences and the John Rinehart Award for his work on high strain rate phenomena. He held a Chair of Excellence at UC3M between 2009 and 2011.

More information:  UC3M Honoris Causa