This past Wednesday, November 11 2020, the Doctoral Thesis presentation and defence of Mr. Urtats Etxegarai was hold with 3 publications ranked Q1-JCR. His work entitled: ‘An intelligent strategy for endurance training based on a virtual lactate sensor' has been co-supervised by Dr. Eva Portillo (Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of the Basque Country) and Dr. Jon Irazusta (Department of Physiology, University of the Basque Country). The thesis has received the ‘International Doctorate’ distinction since Urtats Etxegarai was a visitor PhD Student at the Knowledge Engineering and Discovery Research Institute KEDRI (Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand) for 6 months (October 2017-April 2018) under a Panther Erasmus Mundus Research fellowship. Due to the Sanitary Emergency, some members of the Thesis Committee attended virtually. The Thesis Committee was formed by Dr. Jose María Sabater (Miguel Hernandez University, Elche, Alicante), Dr. Javier Gil (Department of Physiology, University of the Basque Country), Dr. María Dolores del Castillo (Centre for Automation and Robotics (CAR), CSIC), Dr. Iñigo San Millan (Department of Human Physiology and Nutrition, University of Colorado) and Dr. Itziar Cabanes (Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of the Basque Country).