How a young chess champion from the rural town of Famaillá, Tucumán, Argentina became a nuclear engineer working on Atrial Fibrillation in Norway

Hi everyone, my name is Sergio Nabil Gadur. I am 27 years old. I come from the northern part of Argentina. My town is characterized by the National Festival of Empanada and a lot of sugar cane plantations. The weather is very warm and humid. In that zone you will find many mountains, lakes and enormous mosquitoes. My life story started in my adolescence when I fell in love with chess. I was the chess champion of my province, Tucumán, for three consecutive years. Then I stopped playing professionally when my university career began. After I successfully completed the first two and half years of chemical engineering at the National University of Tucumán, thanks to the suggestion of some professors, I realized there existed a prestigious institution of physics and engineering in the southern part of Argentina (Patagonia), characterized by many mountains, rains and snow which attracted many international tourists. These landscapes and the weather present the perfect opportunity to practice activities like skiing, hiking and kayaking. However, my passions were always chess and cycling. So I took a Mathematics and Physics exam to be admitted at the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche and after a psychological interview I was accepted as a Bachelor of Sciences degree student. A new adventure began accompanied with a new home, weather and classmates that would become my new family. After five years I graduated as a nuclear engineer and successfully finished my master’s degree. Both theses were performed in the computational fluid dynamics area in the Computational Mechanics Department at the Bariloche Atomic Centre. I simulated fluid structure interaction problems which involved passive safety devices to ensure the safety of nuclear reactors. To my good fortune, it is remarkable that the study of fluid movement is an engineering branch that can be addressed from different engineering careers, and is in charge of giving responses to problems from different areas such as medicine, petroleum, race cars, etc. I decided to change my life when I took the advice of a colleague from my office when I was a Master’s student who told me that I could work computing blood flow. This idea fascinated me and started to run through my head until it convinced me that studying non-Newtonian fluids like blood was what I was predestined to do. When I graduated, I applied for a PhD scholarship and after several interviews with Simula, I was selected as the successful candidate of the PhD program at the University of Oslo. I have been working from home (Argentina) since April 2021 because of the pandemic. I arrived in Oslo, Norway on September 9, 2021. This is my first time in Europe so everything is new for me. New culture, new language, and new company. Regarding the scientific field, I am progressing in the verification of the Oasis Navier-Stokes solver implementing a non-Newtonian fluid model. As part of my secondments in the PersonalizeAF project, I will meet with my colleagues in Italy later in October 2021. I am really excited about the potential networking through the trips in our secondments. It’s a really good opportunity to collaborate together with other parts of the PersonalizeAF project. I will also visit Barcelona and Germany as part of my secondments and it seems like a little trip to my roots, since Argentina was founded by the Spanish, Italians and Germans. I will keep you updated through these posts. See you in the next post. As always, please do not forget to follow the progress of all the ESR students involved the project by checking all the official sites. Sincerely, Sergio Nabil Gadur, ESR13 Twitter Linkedin