On May 28, 2019, Gisele Helena Miranda Barboni successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis "Towards spatially explicit modeling on networks: understanding patterns & describing processes" at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Computation of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and was awarded the joint degree of Doctor of Computer Science and Computational Mathematics (University of São Paulo) and Doctor of Applied Biological Sciences (Ghent University). The thesis was supervised by Odemir Martinez Bruno (University of São Paulo) and Bernard De Baets and Jan Baetens (Ghent University). This achievement represents a milestone in the longstanding cooperation between KERMIT and the University of São Paulo.