Roxana Băcălie joins the team

Welcome to Roxana Băcălie, my new MSc student, whose thesis project I will be co-supervising with Dr. Max Bannach and Dr. Neil Yorke-Smith!

About Roxana

After completing a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering at Gheorghe Asachi Technical University (Romania), Roxana came to the Netherlands to study Computer Science at Delft University of Technology. While passionate for the abstract elements of mathematics and puzzle-solving, Roxana enjoys applying her analytical skills to solving more concrete problems, also, as witnessed by her software development internship at Amazon.

The project: Complex satellite constellation design

Over the coming 9 months, Roxana will be working on a very exciting collaboration with the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Advanced Concepts Team (ACT). In particular, she will be building on work done by Dr. Max Bannach, who will be an external supervisor for this project. I met Dr. Bannach in September, while attending his Dagstuhl seminar on Optimization and Automated Reasoning for Designing Future Space Missions, and I am thrilled that he agreed to be part of this project.

Dr. Bannach’s earlier work on modelling the communication reliability of satellite constellations forms the inspiration of this project, along with my earlier work on satellite constellation design for monitoring and network reliability optimisation. Roxana will explore how the insights from this earlier work can be applied to future-proof and resource-efficient satellite constellations that provide highly reliable long-distance communication networks for quantum communication as well as classical communication.

I am very excited about this project and am confident that Roxana will be able to report some interesting findings by the end of it!