Important Milestone: PhD Thesis Defended

An important milestone was achieved last month at the IBM Forum in Brussels. I defended my PhD thesis on June 24th. This thesis represents the consolidation of all my research produced on the promising field of UI-Business alignment so far. I am now a doctor in Management Science.

The ceremony was preceded by a presentation of Dr. Noi Sukaviriya, a distinguished researcher of the Watson Research Center, NY. The subject of her presentation was “Human Aspects and Entity-Centric Business Process Modeling”, summarizing the IBM contributions on rethinking the way how business processes might be managed in the future.

The ceremony began when the jury entered the room and the president of the jury, Prof. Philippe Chevalier, presented the members of the jury, who were Prof. Jean Vanderdonckt (UCL, Belgium), the advisor; Prof. Gaëlle Calvary (UJF – Grenoble INP, France); Prof. Stéphane Faulkner (UCL, Belgium); Prof. Manuel Kolp (UCL, Belgium); and Dr. Noi Sukaviriya (IBM Research, United States). Unfortunately, the jury could not count on the presence of Prof. Elizabeth Furtado (Unifor, Brazil), who was my advisor during my scientific initiation and Masters. Although, she had an important participation on my private defense early this year.

I presented my research during 35 minutes. After that, the president passed the word to the jury for questions. I was questioned for more 15 minutes, going very well in all answers. Then the president called the jury in private out of the room to the final deliberation. After some minutes the jury and the president came back to the room and announced their decision, assigning to me the title of “Docteur en sciences économiques et de gestion” for the PhD thesis entitled “A Model-Driven Approach for User Interface – Business Process Alignment”.

The ceremony was witnessed by friends, relatives, co-workers and IBM employees. Most of them were kindly mentioned in the thesis acknowledgments for their direct support for the success of this challenging journey. This post is one more opportunity to say “thank you” to all the supporters who kept me highly motivated in my research.