Lucía Pallarés awarded a grant by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

The grant is offered under the Signal Processing Society Scholarship Program, coordinated by the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS). The grant is a financial endowment of up to seven thousand dollars, distributed over three years, with the aim of covering part of the costs of studies in the field of telecommunications engineering, specifically in the field of signal processing. Forty grants were awarded worldwide and Laura Pallarés was the only student from a Spanish university to obtain one.

Pallarés' thesis, directed by professors José A. López-Salcedo and Gonzalo Seco, studies future positioning and navigation systems based on the combination of 5G/6G signals from cell phone networks with the use of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. This approach aims to solve the problems of lack of accuracy, reliability and security presented by current satellite positioning systems, such as GPS and Galileo, when users are in urban environments with poor visibility of the sky and reflections from nearby obstacles.

With more than 460,000 members from 190 different countries, the IEEE is the largest international association dedicated to technological advances. It brings together specialists in new technologies from different fields, ranging from electrical and systems engineering to electronics, telecommunications and computer science.