phd thesis award

PhD Dissertation Award

About the award for best dissertation in public policy and management.

The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) seeks to recognize emergent scholars in the field by presenting an award for the best PhD dissertation in public policy and management. 

For the 2024 nominations, any dissertation that has been completed in the academic years 2022 - 2023 or 2023 - 2024, and granted a degree in that period, is eligible for consideration. No dissertation that has been completed prior to May 1, 2022 will be accepted and previously submitted dissertations will not be considered. Dissertations from any discipline are acceptable as long as they deal substantively with public policy issues and are nominated by a faculty member from an APPAM institutional member university. The faculty member does not need to be the major adviser or supervisor of the student’s dissertation, but can nominate the dissertation based on the belief that it makes a strong contribution to policy analysis.  

Nominations are now open through July 17, 2024! Access the nomination form  here .

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Congratulations to the 2023 Recipient!

Neil Cholli University of Chicago The 2023 PhD Dissertation Award for Best Dissertation in Public Policy and Management will be presented to  Neil Cholli . Cholli received his PhD from University of Chicago in December 2022 where he completed his dissertation Essays on Social Policy Reforms and Human Capital . He is currently serving as a Klarman Fellow at Cornell University. 

Honorable Mentions Andrew King, University of Massachusetts, Boston Opening the Halls of Power: Implementing a Community Organizing Approach to Parent Engagement in New York City's Community Schools Paula Clasing, University of Michigan The Promise of Free Tuition: The Case of Chile  

Prior Winners

2021 - 2022.

Katharine Nelson, Housing Initiative at Penn (HIP) FHA and the Dual Mortgage Delivery System in Philadelphia

Honorable Mentions Hector Blanco, Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Economic Effects of Public Housing Programs Isabelle Cohen, University of California, Berkeley Essays on Public Finance and Development

2020 - 2021

George Zuo, University of Maryland Essays on Bridging Economic and Educational Disparities in America

Honorable Mentions Zachary Bleemer, University of California Berkeley On the Meritocratic Allocation of Higher Education Brandyn Churchill, Vanderbilt University Three Essays in Health Economics Ezra Karger, University of Chicago Essays on the Measurement of Income in Economic Analysis

Jun Li, University of Michigan Medicare Incentives, Payment Reform, and Quality in the Nursing Home Health Care Sector

2019 - 2020

Cody Tuttle, University of Maryland Government Responses to Crime and Racial Inequality

Honorable mentions Theresa Anderson, George Washington University What If Mom Went Back to School? A Mixed Methods Study of Effects and Experiences for Both Generations When Mothers Return to School

Andrew Bacher-Hicks, Harvard University Essays on the Economics of Education

2018 - 2019

Shiran Victoria Shen, Stanford University Political Pollution Cycle: An Inconvenient Truth and How to Break It

Honorable mentions: Patricio Dominiquez Rivera, Inter-American Development Bank and Elizabeth Pérez-Chiqués, CIDE

2017 - 2018

Garima Siwach, University at Albany, State University of New York Impact of Employment Barriers on Individuals with Criminal Records: An Econometric Evaluation of Criminal Records in New York Honorable mentions: Y. Nina Gao, University of Chicago and Allison C. Kelly, University of Washington

2016 - 2017

Mallory Flowers, Georgia Tech School of Public Policy Green Certification Pathways: The Roles of Public Goods, Private Goods and Certification Schemes Honorable mentions: Alan Zarychta, University of Colorado - Boulder

2015 - 2016

Vincent Reina, University of Southern California, Sol Price School of Public Policy The Impact of Mobility and Government Rental Subsidies on the Welfare of Households and Affordability of Markets Honorable mentions: Eric Roberts, John Hopkins University and Daniel Sebastian Tello-Trillo, Vanderbilt University

Manasi Deshpande, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Essays on the Effects of Disability Insurance Honorable mentions: Alexander Smith, University of Virginia and Gabriel Cardona-Fox, University of Texas, Austin

Anjali Adukia, Harvard University The Role of Basic Needs in Educational Decisions: Essays in Education and Development Economics Honorable mention: Sara Heller, University of Chicago

Sarah Anzia, University of California, Berkeley Election Timing and the Political Influence of the Organized Honorable mention: Hosung Sohn, University of California, Berkeley

Daeho Kim, Brown University

Essays in Health Economics

Honorable mentions:

Chloe Gibbs, University of Chicago

Christopher Robert, Harvard University JFK School of Government

Kurt Lavetti, University of California-Berkeley

Essays on the Estimation of Prices in Implicit Markets

Cassandra Marie Doll Hart, Northwestern University

Heidi Williams, MIT

Essays on Technological Change in Healthcare Markets

Kristin Seefeldt, University of Michigan

Judith Scott-Clayton, Harvard University JFK School of Government

2008 - 2009

Steven Hemelt, University of Maryland-Baltimore County

Essays in Education Policy: Accountability, Achievement, and Access

None recognized for this year

Haitao Yin, University of Pennsylvania

The Environmental and Economic Impacts of Environmental Regulations: The Case of Underground Storage Tank Regulations

Maria Fitzpatrick, University of Virginia

Jeremy Rosner, University of Maryland

Christopher Herbst, University of Maryland-College Park

Effects of Social Policy Reforms and the Economy on Welfare Participation and Employment of Single Mothers

Douglas Carr, University of Kentucky

Stephanie Cellini, University of California-Los Angeles

Kilkon Ko, University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs

Behaviors of Policy Analysts in Public Investment Decisions: How Policy Analysts Make Decisions

Leah Brooks, University of California-Los Angeles

Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal, Northwestern University

Asim Zia, Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy

Cooperative and Non-Cooperative Decision Behaviors in Response to the Inspection and Maintenance Program in the Atlanta Airshed, 1997-2001

Margaret Patrick Haist, University of Kentucky

Sergio Fernandez, University of Georgia

Shreyasi Jha, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Linkages Between Trade and Liberalization and Environmental Policy: Evidence from India

Zhong Yi Tong, University of Maryland

Jesse Levin, University of Amsterdam and Tinbergen Institute

Rucker Johnson, University of Michigan

Essays on Urban Spatial Structure, Job Search and Job Mobility

R. Karl Rethemeyer, Harvard University JFK School of Government

Gail Corrado, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Mark Long, University of Michigan

The Effects of Education Policy on College Entry and Household Savings

Brian Jacob, University of Chicago

Katherine Magnuson, Northwestern University

Jacob Hacker, Yale University

Boundary Wars: Political Struggle Over Public and Private Social Benefits in the U.S.

Jean Marie Abraham, Carnegie Mellon University

Shanti Rabindran Gamper, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Susanna Loeb, University of Michigan

Economic Analyses of Elementary and Secondary School Resource Provision

Laura J. Dugan, Carnegie Mellon University

Patrick McEwan, Stanford University

Meredith Phillips, Northwestern University

Early Inequalities: The Development of Ethnic Differences in Academic Achievement During Childhood

Karen Baehler, University of Maryland

Carol Silva, University of Rochester

Kevin Volpp, University of Pennsylvania

Market-based Reforms and the Impact on Quality of Care: An Examination of the Quality Impacts of the Transition from Hospital Rate-Setting to Price Competition in New Jersey

Kim Rueben, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Katherine Baicker, Harvard University JFK School of Government

Xavier De Souza Briggs, Harvard University JFK School of Government

Brown Kids in White Suburbs: Housing Mobility, Neighborhood Effects and the Social Capital of Poor Youth

Ingrid Gould Ellen, New York University

Rebecca London, Northwestern University

Sheila E. Murray, University of Maryland-College Park

Two Essays on the Distribution of Education Resources and Outcomes

Johannes M. Bos, New York University Wagner School of Public Service

The Labor Market Value of Remedial Education: Evidence from Time Series Data on an Experimental Program for School Dropouts

Kathryn A. Foster, Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs

Special Districts and the Political Economy of Metropolitan Service Delivery

Thomas J. Nechyba, University of Rochester

Fiscal Federalism and Local Public Finance: A General Equilibrium Approach with Voting

Kenneth Langa, University of Chicago Harris School of Policy Studies

Medicaid Cost-Containment in the 1980s: Did It Encourage Interpayer Differences in Hospital Care

Thomas J. Kane, Harvard University JFK School of Government

College Entry by Blacks Since 1970: The Role of Tuition, Financial Aid, Local Economic Conditions and Family Background

About the 2019 Recipient: Shiran Victoria Shen, University of Virginia

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Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award

Establishment & support.

This award was established in 1985 (originally as the Simon Ramo Award and formerly as the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis in Plasma Physics Award) and endowed in 1997 by General Atomics Inc .

Rules & Eligibility

Nomination & selection process.

Deadline: Tuesday, April 16, 2024

The nomination package should include:

• APS Prizes and Awards nomination form (nominee’s contact information, thesis date).
• Your letter of not more than 1,000 words evaluating the nominee's qualifications for the award.
• At least two, but no more than four, seconding letters of not more than 1000 words each. Primary and seconding letters exceeding 1000 words will not be considered in the evaluation of nominees.
• The nominee's thesis.
• A list of the nominee's publications and presentations related to the thesis.

To start a new or update a continuing nomination, please see the  Prize & Award Nomination Guidelines .

2023 Selection Committee Members: Brett Chapman (Chair), Peng Zhang, Emily Belli, Johan Frenje, Gennady Fiksel

The membership of APS is diverse and global, and the nominees and recipients of APS Honors should reflect that diversity so that all are recognized for their impact on our community. Nominations of members belonging to groups traditionally underrepresented in physics, such as women, LGBT+ scientists, scientists who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), disabled scientists, scientists from institutions with limited resources, and scientists from outside the United States, are especially encouraged.

Nominees for and holders of APS Honors (prizes, awards, and fellowship) and official leadership positions are expected to meet standards of professional conduct and integrity as described in the  APS Ethics Guidelines . Violations of these standards may disqualify people from consideration or lead to revocation of honors or removal from office.

2023 Recipient

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• EECS Celebrates Awards

EECS presents annual awards for outstanding PhD and SM theses

By [email protected].

November 6, 2018

Anne Stuart | EECS

The faculty and leadership of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) recently presented 13 awards for outstanding student work on recent master’s and PhD theses. Awards and recipients included:

Jin-Au Kong Award for Best PhD Theses in Electrical Engineering

• Yu-Hsin Chen, now Research Scientist, NVIDIA Research, for “Architecture Design for Highly Flexible and Energy-Efficient Deep Neural Network Accelerators.” Professors Vivienne Sze and Joel Emer, supervisors.
• Chiraag Juvekar, now Research Scientist, Analog Garage, Analog Devices, for “Hardware and Protocols for Authentication and Secure Computation.” Professor Anantha Chandrakasan, supervisor.

George M. Sprowls Awards for Best PhD Theses in Computer Science

• Arturs Backurs, now Research Assistant Professor, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), for “Below P vs NP: Fine-Grained Hardness for Big Data Problems.” Professor Piotr Indyk, supervisor.
• Gregory Bodwin, now Postdoctoral Researcher, Georgia Institute of Technology, for Sketching Distances in Graphs.” Professor Virginia Williams, supervisor.
• Zoya Bylinskii, now Research Scientist, Adobe Research, for “Computational Perception for Multi-Modal Document Understanding.” Professor Fredo Durand and Dr. Aude Oliva, supervisors.
• David Harwath, now Research Scientist, Spoken Languages Systems Group, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), for “Learning Spoken Language Through Vision.” Dr. James R. Glass, supervisor.
• Jerry Li, now VM Research Fellow, Simons Institute, University of California Berkeley, for “Principled Approaches to Robust Machine Learning Beyond.” Professor Ankur Moitra, supervisor.
• Ludwig Schmidt, now Postdoctoral Researcher in Computer Science, University of California Berkeley, for “Algorithms Above the Noise Floor.” Professor Piotr Indyk, supervisor.
• Adriana Schulz, now Assistant Professor, University of Washington, for “Computational Design for the Next Manufacturing Revolution.” Professor Wojciech Matusik, supervisor.

Ernst A. Guillemin Award for Best SM Thesis in Electrical Engineering

• Matthew Brennan, now a PhD student in EECS at MIT, for “Reducibility and Computational Lower Bounds for Problems with Planted Sparce Structure.” Professor Guy Bresler, supervisor.
• Syed Muhammad Imaduddin, now a PhD student in EECS at MIT, for “A Pseudo-Bayesian Model-Based Approach for Noninvasive Intracranial Pressure Estimation.” Professor Thomas Heldt, supervisor.

William A. Martin Award for Best SM Thesis in Computer Science

• Favyen Bastani, now a PhD student in EECS at MIT, for “Robust Road Topology Extraction from Aerial Imagery.” Professors Sam Madden, Hari Balakrishnan, and Mohammad Alizadeh.
• Wengong Jin, now a PhD student in EECS at MIT, for “Neural Graph Representation Learning with Application to Chemistry.” Professor Regina Barzilay, supervisor.

EECS Professor Martin Rinard and Professor Asu Ozdaglar, EECS department head, presented the awards during a luncheon ceremony. The PhD award winners were selected by Professor Dirk Englund (for electrical engineering) and Professor Vinod Vaikuntanathan (for computer science). The Sprowls Awards Committee, consisting of Professors Mohammad Alizadeh, Michael Carbin, and Julian Shun, assisted with selection of the PhD awards in computer science.

The SM awards were selected by Professor Elfar Adalsteinsson (for electrical engineering) and Professor Antonio Torralba (for computer science).

Media Inquiries

Journalists seeking information about EECS, or interviews with EECS faculty members, should email [email protected] .

Please note: The EECS Communications Office only handles media inquiries related to MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. Please visit other school, department, laboratory, or center websites to locate their dedicated media-relations teams.

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2021 Thesis Prize: 17 PhD graduates honoured by the University of Luxembourg

29 December 2021

Excellent Thesis Award.

The University of Luxembourg held its annual PhD graduation Ceremony on 17 December on Belval Campus. The celebration honoured the doctoral and award-winning graduates who received their diplomas and awards on stage.

More than 150 doctoral students graduated from the four doctoral schools of the University of Luxembourg.

Seventeen doctoral graduates received special recognition for their thesis work, considered to be of exceptional quality. One graduate was awarded with the Fondation Auguste Laval Prize.

Recognising the scientific excellence of PhD students

The University of Luxembourg grants Excellent Thesis Awards to honour doctoral graduates who have demonstrated excellence, originality and depth of knowledge in their thesis.

This year, 17 graduates have received this award:

Excellent Thesis Awardees from Doctoral School in Science and Engineering

Jérémie Dauphin

Thesis: Argument Acceptance and Commitment in Formal Argumentation

Khouloud Gaaloul

Thesis: Verification of design models of cyber-physical systems specified in Simulink

Alirez Haqiqatnejad

Thesis: Enhanced Signal Space Design for Multiuser MIMO Interference Channels

Susana Martinez Arbas  

Thesis: Integrated multi-omic analyses of mobile genetic elements within a mixed microbial community

Cosme Milesi-Brault

Thesis: Old and New Antiferroelectrics: Experimental studies of phase transitions in model materials

Yamila Omar

Thesis: Complex Network in manufacturing suitability and interpretation

Martin Stöhr

Thesis: van der Waals Dispersion Interactions in Biomolecular Systems: Quantum-Mechanical Insights and Methodological Advances

Thesis: Scalable Control of Asynchronous Boolean Networks

Emiliano Torti

Thesis: On reductions of local and global Galois representations modulo prime powers

Valentino Vigneri

Thesis: Load bearing mechanisms of headed stud shear connections in profiled steel sheeting transverse to the beam

Hannah Wurzer

Thesis: Tumour immune evasion is promoted by actin cytoskeleton-driven polarization of inhibitory signals to the immunological synapse

Excellent Thesis Awardees from Doctoral School in Humanities and Social Sciences

Verena Distler

Thesis: The Experience of Security in Human-Computer Interactions: Understanding Security Perceptions Through the Concept of User Experience

Christina Haas

Thesis: Higher education trajectories and social origin in Germany and the United States: A comparative sequence-analytical approach

Christine Ruppert

Thesis: Die frühkaiserzeitliche Grabarchitektur aus Orolaunum vicus/Arlon: Rekonstruktion und Kontextualisierung der Grabbauten einer lokalen Elite

Vitus Sproten

Thesis: Der Klang des Strukturwandels. Die Geschichte der freien Radios in den Niederlanden, Belgien und Nordrhein-Westfalen (1975-1990 )

Excellent Thesis Awardee from Doctoral School in Economics, Finance and Management

Rana Cömertpay

Thesis: Essays on the Economics of Forced Displacement and Conflict

Excellent Thesis Awardee from Doctoral School of Law

Teresa Quintel

Thesis: Managing migration flows by processing personal data within the adequate data protection instrument. Scoping exercise between general and law enforcement data protection rules applicable to third country nationals

The Fondation Auguste Laval Prize  was awarded to  Tài Nguyen for his thesis on “magnetoelectric thin-film composites for energy harvesting applications”.

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The IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC) is a technical committee within IEEE Computer Society, aimed at fostering research and education in scalable computing with applications. The committee solicits nominations of Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award. The award includes an award plaque that will be presented at the annual IEEE HPCC conference, along with a public citation for the award on the IEEE TCSC website. The IEEE TCSC Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award is an annual award to recognize candidates that have recently received a PhD degree for no more than 2 years and have written an outstanding PhD dissertation in the field of the scalable computing with applications. This award is established to encourage doctoral research that combines theory and practice or makes in-depth technical contributions, having the potential to contribute to the IEEE TCSC.

• A candidate may be nominated by members of the community.
• Self-nominations are not eligible.
• An individual may nominate at most one candidate for this award.
• Name/email of person making the nomination; self-nominations are not eligible.
• Name/email of candidate for whom the award is recommended.
• A statement by the nominator (maximum of 500 words) as to why the nominee is highly deserving of the award and a brief summary of the service contributions.
• CV of the nominee.
• Up to three support letters from persons other than the nominator; these should be collected by the nominator and included in the nomination.
• A doctoral dissertation written by the applicant in any language, no more than 2 years prior to the submission deadline.
• A summary of the dissertation in English of up to 2 pages in length written by the PhD candidate, highlighting the significance of the problem, the technical approach taken, and the application context and potential.
• Sample published paper(s) in English based on the dissertation written primarily by the PhD candidate in scientific journals, especially IEEE Transactions/Journals.
• Listing of all publications by the applicant in the related field.
• A letter of recommendation from the applicant’s dissertation advisor that assesses the significance of the research, attests to the originality of the work, and comments on the engagement of the applicant in the TCSC field.
• Nomination Deadline: October 31, 2023
• Results Notification: November 15, 2023
• Hai Jiang (Chair), Arkansas State University, USA ( [email protected] )
• Bernady O. Apduhan, Kyushu Sangyo University, Japan ( [email protected] )
• Beniamino Di Martino, Universita' della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli", Italy ( [email protected] )
• Didier El Baz, LAAS-CNRS, France ( [email protected] )

Awardees will be presented a plaque and will be recognized by IEEE TCSC in its website, newsletter and archives. The awards for 2023 will be presented at a selected IEEE TCSC sponsored conference.

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TU/e PhD thesis award nominees

A transdisciplinary decision-making approach to food-water-energy nexus: a guide towards sustainable development, built environment.

If we keep on exploiting food, water, and energy as we do now, by 2050, we will need the resources of three Earths. A solution is cross-sectoral policy coordination. How? By aligning priorities and ensuring coherence in objectives. The S.N.O.G. serious game embodies an ideal support tool for this end.

Two problems may seem like a burden alone, but together they can be a gateway to opportunities

• PhD Thesis Maryam Ghodsvali (pdf 8 MB)

Dr.  Maryam Ghodsvali

Dr.  Ginevra Sanvitale

Technopolitical Resonance. Emotions, computers and socialism in Cold War Italy

Industrial engineering and innovation sciences.

My PhD project investigated the role of emotions in the de-politicisation and re-politicisation of computer debates during the Cold War. These debates crucially informed technology design and expectations of the current Digital Age: Understanding the role of emotions and politics is fundamental to build a human-centered digital future.

If we want to build a human-centred Digital Age, we need to look at politics and emotions as features, not as bugs

• Thesis (pdf 4 MB)

Quick as a flick: All-optical control over ultrafast magnetization writing

Applied physics.

Data storage devices in datacenters are reaching limits in speed and energy efficiency. These limits could be overcome by using ultrashort light pulses to write data in magnetic devices. We explored several aspects of this technique, which could drive the highly efficient data storage devices of the future..

"The combination of photonics and spintronics offers exciting possibilities for the data processing devices of the future"  . 

• Thesis (pdf 22 MB)

Dr. Youri van Hees

Dr. Maarten Houben

Design for Everyday Sounds in Dementia

Industrial design .

This thesis has highlighted the unexplored potential of everyday sounds to evoke memories, positive emotions, and conversations in people with dementia. Technology can offer tangible interactions with personal sound content and support recreational activities at home or person-centred care to enrich the everyday experiences of dementia.

" Everyday sounds can trigger very specific memories, and it’s precisely those memories that are important for people with dementia to maintain and express their identity and personality”

• Thesis (pdf 16 MB)

A guide to learning modules in a dynamic network

Electrical engineering.

Data-driven models of a system are used for various purposes like prediction, simulation, system design, monitoring, and diagnosis. But the advancements in technology have made real-life systems increasingly complex. How do we develop these models for complex large-scale interconnected systems? My research provides the necessary tools and an easy guide to every experimenter for this, paving the way for the need-of-the-hour industrial applications like fault diagnosis and the development of digital twins.

You don’t need to be Nostradamus. By being aware of the past and vigilant about the present, you can predict the future

• Thesis (pdf 3 MB)

Dr. Karthik Raghavan Ramaswamy

Exploring the Morphology, Chemistry, and Mechanics of Biogenic Silica in Diatoms

Chemical engineering and chemistry.

Many biomaterials are well-known due to their sophisticated morphologies and remarkable mechanical properties that have been produced by combining relatively simple ingredients. In our research we developed a versatile toolbox to determine the mechanical properties of biogenic silica of an algae known as diatom and to monitor the effects of environmental variations on these properties by a combination of cutting-edge electron microscopy techniques with micromanipulators and ion beam nanomachining.

As humans, we may not be able to copy exactly what nature is so cleverly doing, but by developing new characterization techniques, we can learn from her to overcome the limitations of our current state-of-the-art man-made materials. 

• Thesis (pdf 12 MB)

Dr. Mohammad Soleimani

Dr. Bregje de Wildt

Advancing Tissue Engineering of in vitro human Bone Models

Biomedical engineering.

Human in vitro bone models have the potential to reduce animal experiments and personalize drug testing. While cells within a healthy body know exactly how to maintain and regenerate bone, outside the body these cells are lost. Here, we studied how we could modify the culture environment of these bone cells to mimic human bone in the laboratory.

Human bone cells are extremely intelligent engineers, yet our understanding relies mostly on animal cells

• Thesis (pdf 8 MB)

Dr. Fahim Shakib

Data-driven modeling and complexity reduction for nonlinear systems with stability guarantees

Mechanical engineering.

The development and operation of engineering systems require compact and high-fidelity mathematical models. My thesis presents methods that construct such models from experimental data and reduce their complexity while ensuring their robustness. The impact of these results has been demonstrated in a use case of respiratory devices used in hospitals.

Data-driven models are abundant, but how to generate simple, accurate, and reliable ones is the key to engineering applications 

• Thesis (pdf 11 MB)

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PhD Thesis Award 2023

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The Graduate School establishes the PhD Thesis Award to recognise, reward and promote the distinguished research achievements by graduating PhD students. There are two award classes, namely Outstanding and Merit, recognising students’ performance of different levels.

• PolyU PhD Thesis Award - Outstanding Award
• PolyU PhD Thesis Award - Merit Award

Outstanding Award

School of Optometry

Faculty of Health and Social Sciences

Thesis Title: Neuroprotection through pharmacological targeting retinal immune microenvironment in retinal neurodegenerative diseases

- for contribution to retinal neuroinflammation and neuroprotection.

Chief Supervisor: Dr DO Chi-wai

Retinal neurodegeneration is a complex process involving the structural and functional loss of neurons and, ultimately, cell death. It commonly occurs in many ocular diseases, leading to severe vision impairment and even blindness. However, current available treatment options for neurodegenerative diseases are scarce. Neuroinflammation triggered by prolonged microglia activation is increasingly reported as a key driver in the progression of neurodegeneration. Emerging evidence suggests that the suppression of neuroinflammation may present a potential therapy for these diseases. In our studies, we discovered that insulin-like growth factor binding protein-like protein 1 (IGFBPL1) is a key regulator of pro-homeostatic microglia through in-depth RNA-sequencing and single-cell RNA sequencing analyses. IGFBPL1 exerted remarkably potent therapeutic effects by inhibiting neuroinflammation and microglial activation via IGF-1R signalling. In addition, we found that baicalein, a natural flavonoid extracted from the root of Scutellaria baocalensis Georgi (SB), effectively suppressed microglia activation via inhibiting IL-17 pathway, as demonstrated by the proteomic study. Therapeutic administration of IGFBPL1 or baicalein not only suppressed microglia-dependent inflammatory cascades but also exhibited neuroprotective effects and improved visual functions post-retinal I/R injury. These results provide new promising alternatives for treating retinal neurodegenerative diseases by suppressing neuroinflammation.

Merit Award

Department of Applied Physics

Faculty of Science

Dr HOU Zhen

Thesis Title: Boosting zinc metal anodes performance via interface engineering: reaction kinetics, morphology control and electrochemical reversibility

- for contribution to understanding zn nucleation and growth towards stable zn metal batteries.

Chief Supervisor: Dr ZHANG Biao

The thesis is devoted to reversible Zn metal anodes through regulating the Zn nucleation and growth. We first demonstrate that the slow desolvation kinetics elevates the nucleation overpotential for improving the nucleation sites through introducing acetonitrile co-solvent into the electrolyte. The electrolyte recipe is further tailored to produce abundant Zn nucleation seeds and smooth Zn growth. The designed oligomer co-solvent enables preferential surface adsorption and the optimized solvation sheath. Furthermore, we propose a facile pulsed cycling protocol where an initial high current density (J) is leveraged to form sufficient nuclei for guiding even metal deposition at standard J in the subsequent process, realizing high-performance Zn, Li and K metal batteries. Besides modulating the Zn nucleation, we also control the Zn growth process by constructing a metallic tin-coated separator. Specifically, its decent electrical conductivity and zincophilicity can eliminate the inevitably formed Zn dendrites via face-to-face Zn growth, thus enabling improved cycle life even at high J and cycling capacity.

Department  of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Faculty of Construction and Environment

Dr ZHANG Pin

Thesis Title: Data-driven modelling of soil properties and behaviours with geotechnical applications

- for contribution to intelligent geomechanics and geoengineering.

Chief Supervisor: Professor YIN Zhenyu

Construction in civil engineering relies on case-specific laboratory and in-situ experiments to determine the characterizations of materials and responses of infrastructure. Thus, generated project data can be plentiful but tends to be underused due to limitations of human interpretation. Data-driven modelling (DDM) is a viable and highly effective solution to extract maximum value from these data. Whilst DDM has brought many benefits in a wide range of disciplines, its generalisability and robustness in the civil engineering domain remain uncertain. Addressing these uncertainties is key for the civil engineering community to adopt new DDM towards achieving global targets of net zero by 2050. This area is also a priority in many countries (National AI Strategy). To this end, my thesis elaborated data-driven models combined with existing physics for predicting soil properties and mechanical behaviours merely based on their micro computed-tomography (μCT) images, and revolutionizing mechanics and civil engineering.

Learn more and get inspired by our past awardees

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Eurographics PhD Award

Eurographics Annual Award for Best PhD Thesis

The current call will close on 14th January, 2024. Eligibility includes a PhD Thesis defended and mainly conducted in Europe or in countries having a Eurographics Chapter or in EG Organizational Member Institutions ( https://www.eg.org/wp/local-chapters/ ). Theses defended and awarded the degree from May 1st, 2022 to October 31st, 2023 are eligible in this edition. The award committee will take both the quality of the research conducted and the scholarliness of the submitted thesis into consideration. The required documentation includes:

• The submission must include a link to the Thesis (in English) pdf in the Eurographics Digital Library, Graphics Dissertation Online. Nominations must refer to Thesis documents being publicly available at Graphics Dissertation Online. Forms and procedures for submission of the thesis for archiving in the Eurographics Digital Library are available at  https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/8107 .
• Full CV of the candidate with explicit mention of which publications resulted from the thesis, and duration of the thesis. Also, please identify up to top three first-authored papers .
• Please upload your submission via the SRM system at  https://srmv2.eg.org/COMFy/Conference/EG_PHD_2024
• Checklist for submission: full cv, list of up to top three first-authored papers, link to thesis (diglib link), and any relevant supporting document — all uploaded via SRM.

The documentation of candidate nominations must be uploaded via the SRM system (see #3 above) and please notify the PhD Thesis Awards chair, Marco Attene, at  [email protected] , not later than 14/01/2024. Submissions can be sent by the candidate, the supervisor, or any other researcher. If you do not receive an acknowledgment within a week, please contact Marco again. All submitted material should be in English. Every Thesis can be submitted only once.

In 2011, Eurographics extended the Research Awards Programme by creating an additional Best PhD Thesis Award. The aim is to recognize good thesis work in Europe, to incentivize young researchers, and to offer them the opportunity to publish the state of the art section of their thesis as a STAR in the Computer Graphics Forum Journal. Eurographics annually grants three PhD thesis awards. They are jointly sponsored by Eurographics and the Computer Graphics Forum Journal.

The PhD Thesis Awards Committee consists of five members. Committee membership will be for three years terms, which will be staggered to ensure continuity. The committee can decide, as an extraordinary measure, to increase the number of awards in some years. The Committee will consider the quality of the work, the review reports, the quality and impact of the publications derived from the thesis, the coherence of the state of the art section in the thesis and any other relevant aspect of the work.

Awarded researchers will be announced and receive a certificate at the opening session of the Annual Eurographics Conference (where they will profit from a free registration). They will also receive a three-years free Eurographics membership (To register please join at https://services.eg.org/EG/Account/Join, choose 3 years and bank transfer and send an email to [email protected] .), and will be invited to prepare a State-of-the-Art paper within two months after the Conference. Submitted papers will follow a fast track review cycle for publication in the STAR section of the Computer Graphics Forum Journal.

The nomination term is now open, see the Call for Candidates above.

Recipients of the Award

In his PhD thesis, Gaspard Zoss made significant contributions towards solving the problem of facial performance retargeting. His work draws extensively on empirical data, and provides methods carefully designed to facilitate current professional workflows.

His thesis has been instrumental in advancing the modeling and acquisition of jaw motion, the removal and synthesis of secondary dynamic effects present in facial performance capture, and data-driven re-aging.

His focus on practical solutions, developed with attention to production pipelines, stands to benefit not only the scientific community, but also the entertainment industry.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2023 PhD Award to Gaspard Zoss.

In his PhD thesis, Georg Sperl explored the use of physical laws governing yarns to model the elasticity of knitted cloth. Georg Sperl proposed an original approach based on simulation of fabrics at the scale of periodic yarn patterns, approximating the mechanical response of real samples from the textile industry. Georg Sperl’s thesis represents an important step toward the real-time simulation of the dynamics of thousands of yarn meshes in real time. A key contribution has been to consider each yarn and its physics, instead of meshes that only reproduce the overall properties of the material, while maintaining a reasonable computational cost. The thesis has the potential to benefit the textile industry in designing new fabrics.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2023 PhD Award to Georg Sperl.

In his PhD thesis, Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu pioneered the use of data-driven approaches for geometric stylization and acceleration. Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu introduced a generic data-driven stylization method based on three ways to characterize the style of geometry: style of rendering, difference between a shape and its simplified counterpart, and similarity of surface normals.

Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu’s thesis also represents an important step towards scalable geometry processing. Key contributions have been to study coarsening algorithms that preserve spectral properties and novel multigrid methods that operate on unstructured curved meshes. The thesis summarizes a coherent activity that goes from shape editing to surface multigrid methods through stylization and shape analogies.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2023 PhD Award to Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu.

In her PhD thesis, Yifan Wang explored the use of deep learning techniques to distill user expertise in geometry processing algorithms. Yifan Wang’s contributions are especially important in applications where geometric details must be preserved or reconstructed starting from incomplete and/or distorted input. Dealing with such challenging data often requires human intervention to compensate for missing or imprecise information. Yifan Wang’s thesis demonstrates that deep learning can effectively minimize this need, and sometimes eliminate it at all, thus representing a significant advancement in practical geometry processing.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2023 PhD Award to Yifan Wang.

In his PhD thesis, Julien Philip pioneered the use of Multi-view Image Editing and Rendering to allow casually captured scenes to be rendered with content alterations such as object removal, re-lighting, or scene composition. Julien Philip exploited an original approach based on optimization techniques and modern deep-learning to take advantage of all the information present in multi-view content while handling specific constraints such as multi-view coherency.

Julien Philip’s thesis represents an important step toward the combination of the flexibility of traditional computer graphics and the ease of capturing assets with images. A key contribution has been to analyze unstructured sets of pictures of real-world environments and obtain a proxy geometry of the scenes using multi-view stereo. The thesis summarizes a coherent activity that goes from treating isolated issues toward a more general neural rendering approach, with notable results such as a multi-view inpainting method that can handle hundreds of images, a deep learning-based multi-view relighting solution for outdoor scenes, a depth map meshing strategy that improves the quality of existing deep blending image-based rendering methods, and a relightable neural renderer for indoor scenes.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2022 PhD Award to Julien Philip.

 In his PhD thesis, Marc Habermann pioneered new methods for the real-time capture and synthesis of human performance.

Marc Habermann’s thesis enables capturing the pose and deforming 3D surface of an actor from a single RGB video. A key contribution is to recover the depth and deformations of the actor even for areas that are not visible to the camera. He shows that splitting the task into two sub-tasks – regressing the pose then regressing the non-rigid deformation of the surface in a canonical pose to account for clothing deformations – enables solving the problem in a coarse to fine manner with a deep neural architecture, in real-time.

The results of his thesis have been published in top-rated computer graphics and computer vision conferences and journals.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2022 PhD Award to Marc Habermann.

In her PhD thesis, Ylva Ferstl pioneered new methods for generating virtual human gestures from speech. She explored approaches for speech-to-motion learning, including the use of transfer learning from speech and motion models, adversarial training, as well as modelling explicit gesture parameters from speech. Based on this research, she developed a system for the expressive parametrization of gesture motion which was evaluated in three perceptual studies. Moreover, as part of her work, she also contributed two datasets of conversational speech and motion that have been made available to the community.

Ylva Ferstl’s thesis represents a forward-looking approach to an important problem and addresses the entire pipeline of gesture generation from speech in a comprehensive manner. Her research has resulted in a number of high-quality papers which have already received considerable attention.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2022 PhD Award to Ylva Ferstl.

In his PhD thesis, Julian Iseringhausen explored the problem of revealing information hidden in generalized image data, for settings where the physical scenes of interest are not directly observable due to obstruction or small size.

Using physics-informed models, computer graphics techniques and numerical simulation combined with discrete optimization, he pioneered novel calibration schemes for non-line-of-sight imaging setups, acquisition of unstructured light fields via water drops utilized as light field imagers, and physical realization of computational parquetry art.

The thesis has made possible to estimate the 3D geometry of a scene “around the corner” through time-resolved transient images, and to extract a full unstructured light field of a scene from a single photo of a glass pane with water drops on it. His research is now stimulating new research work.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2021 PhD Award to Julian Iseringhausen.

In his PhD thesis, Michal Piovarci has made significant contributions to the recent field of perception-aware fabrication, which involves human interaction beyond the visual and connects human perception research and computational design for fabrication. The key motivation of his work is to consider human perception for the computational design and realization of physical objects and products that are intended to be used by humans.

Michal Piovarci’s thesis presents pioneering work in haptic perception, in the context of physics simulation and fabrication. It shows that incorporating perceptual models of human haptic feedback yields improvements in both the quality and performance of algorithms for computational fabrication. His work shows that manufacturing itself can be automatically incorporated inside a design loop to build artifacts that are optimally perceived while undergoing complex interactions. A key contribution has been to establish the mapping between desired perceptual properties and physical artifacts through fabrication-in-the-loop optimization methods when pure numerical solutions do not exist. During his PhD thesis, Michal Piovarci contributed a number of algorithmic innovations in the areas of physics simulation, simulation-guided optimization, one-shot learning as well as perceptual model creation. Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2021 PhD Award to Michal Piovarci.

In his PhD thesis, Ruslan Guseinov pioneered new methods for the design and fabrication of doubly curved shells, from an initial flat state. He explored both shells that are deformed by applying external loads, and the first self-morphing shells that are programmable in space-time. The latter demonstrate unprecedented control over deformation rates during the morphing processes. The contributed methodologies contribute and bridge several fields such as computer graphics, mechanical engineering and architecture.

Ruslan Guseinov’s thesis enables a wide range of practical applications and will inspire future work such as design and realization of freeform cold bent glass facades, fabrication of self-morphing mechanisms via 4D printing, materials reacting to various physical stimuli and self-shaping medical devices or furniture.

The results of his thesis have been published both in top-rated graphics conferences as well as in the prestigious Nature Communications venue.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2021 PhD Award to Ruslan Guseinov.

Two honorable mentions: Abhimitra Meka and Thomas Müller

Eurographics is delighted to present a PhD thesis award to Christopher Brandt for his strong technical contributions in developing novel model order reduction tools to devise fast approximation algorithms for a broad variety of problems, such as modeling and simulation of elastic bodies, design of tangential vector fields on curved surfaces, and approximation of curve-like data.

Eurographics is delighted to present a PhD thesis award to Thomas Leimkuehler for his strong technical contributions in setting new state-of-the art in view synthesis techniques by applying  classical and modern tools from artificial intelligence to speed up and extend the scope of image-based rendering.

Eurographics is delighted to present a PhD thesis award to Mina Konakovic Lukovic for her strong technical contributions in computational fabrication by  developing computational tools based on the insights from differential geometry to create programmable materials and turn flat materials into complex curved structures.

Eurographics is delighted to present a PhD thesis award to Aron Monszpart for his strong technical contributions to 3D scene understanding from RGB[-D] sequences with high levels of occlusion using non-visual queues, derived from Newtonian physics, non-local spatial regularity and consistency with human interactions, for generating realistic 3D reconstructions of static and dynamic environments.

Eurographics is delighted to present a PhD thesis award to  Ana Serrano for her strong technical contributions spanning multiple areas of visual computing, namely computational imaging,  material appearance perception and editing, and virtual reality, integrating human perception in the design of new algorithms.

Dan Koschier for his strong technical contributions to fast and robust numerical simulation techniques for visual effects particularly in the context of novel FEM-based methods for simulating cutting and fracturing of solids and the simulation of incompressible fluids using SPH discretizations.

Pascal Bérard for his strong technical contributions in geometric modeling focusing on reconstruction, modeling, and rigging of human eyes for computer animation and tracking applications and setting the tone for high-quality eye modeling for digital human avatars of the future.

Eduard Zell for his strong technical contributions to designing perceptual studies to understand the critical factors behind appealing human characters under stylization effects as well as developing algorithms for transferring static properties and animation between realistic and stylized faces.

Honorable mentions: Anastasia Tkach and Julio Marco

Miika Aittala for his strong technical contributions in computational photography and enabling appearance capture of surface material appearance for real world complex materials using simple hardware and limited measurements with a particular focus on spatially varying reflectance properties.

Jérémie Dumas for his strong technical contributions in computational fabrication and modeling of complex shapes, and by-example shape synthesis, while taking into account physical behaviour of fabricated structures including mechanical, and elastic properties.

Pablo Garrido for his strong technical contributions to face capture, animation, and editing from video by combining expressive parametric 3D models with inverse rendering to recover highly-detailed faces and demonstrating impressive applications including virtual dubbing and face reenactment.

Petr Kellnhofer for his strong technical contribution in perceptual modeling for stereoscopic 3D by running dedicated perceptual studies, deriving new perceptual models from his findings, and integrating these models in computer graphics algorithms.

Morten Bojsen-Hansen for his strong technical contributions to water simulation techniques for visual effects particularly in topology adaptation, tracking of free fluid surfaces, and handling spatially and time-varying boundary flows.

Tobias Guenther for his strong technical contributions in optimization-based opacity control of lines and surfaces for occlusion reduction and utilizing techniques from light transport for visualization of unsteady flow.

Adrian Jarabo for his strong technical contributions to computational imaging by studying the plenoptic function for multidimensional light transport particularly for editing light fields, capturing complex appearances using BTF, and investigating transient light transport.

Fabrice Rousselle for his strong technical contribution to the reduction of noise artifacts in rendering by the development of an image space adaptive framework for Monte Carlo rendering.

Marcel Campen for his strong technical contribution to geometry processing field, proposing innovative efficient strategies and algorithms for the generation of high quality quadrilateral layouts.

Kai Lawonn for his strong technical contribution to illustrative scientific visualization, presenting novel line drawing techniques for depicting medical surfaces and structures in a appealing and informative way.

Iliyan Georgiev for his strong technical contribution to light transport simulation in proposing efficient path sampling techniques for scenes containing surfaces and participating media.

Duygu Ceylan In her PhD thesis, Duygu Ceylan pioneered new algorithms for image-based 3D reconstruction and modeling based on symmetry priors.

Belen Masia In her PhD Thesis, Belen Masia has made significant contributions to the different stages of the imaging pipeline: capture, processing, editing, and visualization.

Francisco Gonzalez , for his strong technical contribution to texturing and modeling, presenting new techniques that allow to cope with continuity issues.

Alec Jacobson , for his strong technical contribution to non linear deformation, proposing new formulations that can be efficiently and practically approximated in real time.

Cengiz Oeztireli , for his strong technical contribution to meshless sampling, manifolds reconstruction, and for the proposal of a unified analysis framework of point distributions.

Thabo Beeler , for his strong technical contribution to the acquisition of the geometry of the human faces at a very high precision under static and also dynamic conditions.

David Bommes , for his strong technical contribution to the creation of high quality anisotropic quadrilateral polygon meshes, by succesfully formulating and solving it as a global constrained optimization problem.

Boris Neubert , for his strong technical contribution to the intelligent content generation, stochastic simplification and rendering of complex natural scenes.

Daniele Panozzo , for his strong technical contribution to the automatic conversion from unstructured triangle meshes onto dense quadrilateral meshes which are symmetry aware and preserve features.

Tunc Ozan Aydin , for his strong and fundamental contributions in the area of high-dynamic-range (HDR) algorithms which are aware of the human vision system.

Bernd Bickel , for his strong technical contribution to face animation and automatic manufacturing of nonlinearly deformable objects, presenting an elegant computational solution for the synthesis of non-linear materials.

Ofir Weber , for his strong technical contribution to shape deformation, making conformal deformations practical and controllable and presenting an elegant and deeper understanding of the problem.

Adrien Bousseau , for his strong technical contribution to expressive image and video manipulations, creating new well founded algorithms that have succedded in fulfilling the artist needs

Thomas Cashman , for his strong technical contribution to subdivision surfaces, by developing the first subdivision extension of NURBS surfaces.

Tobias Ritschel , for his strong technical contribution to the perceptually-motivated interactive rendering and editing using global illumination techniques.

Full Citations of Eurographics PhD Awards

(2011) Adrien Bousseau ’s PhD dissertation contains exciting and significant contributions to the field of non-photorealistic rendering, by proposing novel algorithms to realize expressive imagery that ressembles artistic work. A central challenge in illustration is coloring line art, to create effects as shading, shadow and focus. His thesis proposes a new vector graphics representation to allow complex gradients design. He solves the problem by finding the image corresponding to a combination of edges as the steady state of a color flowing process in the plane. The thesis also deals on the stylization of animations. Two methods, based on texture blending, are proposed to produce temporally coherent watercolorization of videos and 3D animated scenes. The thesis has already led to significant and large impact papers in top Journals in Computer Graphics, which that are now fostering new research work, industry projects and artist ideas.

(2011) Tom Cashman ’s PhD dissertation contains a fundamental breakthrough in unifying NURBS and subdivision, something that many had come to believe impossible. He presents new results on the construction and analysis of subdivision surfaces of arbitrary topology, arbitrary degree, and arbitrary knot spacing of the underlying space of B-splines. His work overcomes the limitations of known approaches and thus perfects the theory of subdivision surfaces in a beautiful and convincing way. The dissertation is a major contribution towards a comprehensive understanding of subdivision as a versatile tool for representing freeform surfaces in computer graphics and scientific computing. The exposition of the material is of the highest standard: the dissertation is elegantly written and beautifully presented. The dissertation was the runner-up in the British Computer Society’s 2010 Distinguished Dissertation Competition.

(2011) Tobias Ritschel ’s PhD dissertation focuses on efficient algorithms for global illumination computations and real time rendering of complex scenes while taking into account human perception. His work succesfully addresses the relevant and difficult topic of interactive global illumination, using a perception-based analysis to derive novel and computationally efficient approximations for global illumination, reflection editing and temporal glare. The proposed algorithms have been skillfully implemented and validated in different test scenarios. The thesis was successfully completed in less than three years and his work has already led to more than ten peer-reviewed publications in the leading International Journals. His research, particularly in imperfect shadow maps and micro rendering, is now triggering new research work.

(2012) Tunç Ozan Aydin ‘s PhD Dissertation focuses on high dynamic range (HDR) image and video quality evaluation while taking into account human perception. His work successfully addressed the relevant and difficult topic of detecting perceivable differences between images of different dynamic range, combining computer science and engineering with human factors and perception. This paves the way for many novel applications such as a direct comparison of HDR images with their tone mapped variants, or quality evaluation for images displayed on devices with drastically different brightness and contrast reproduction capabilities. The proposed quality metrics are publicly available as a free Web service, which gains popularity both in the research and industry community. A further contribution of his thesis is the reliable detection of the visibility of image details under dynamically changing light conditions, by accounting for the dynamics of human brightness perception.

(2012) Bernd Bickel ‘s PhD Dissertation presents novel and significant results on the field of capturing and manufacturing deformable materials. It is the first work to consider facial capture, animation of facial deforming materials and manufacturing of nonlinearly deformable objects. His research encompasses both data-driven and physically-based methods. He has proposed new methods to model facial geometry and wrinkle detail at multiple scales, together with data-driven retargeting algorithms to transfer geometric and motion detail from a source face to a target face. Morevoer, his work has been seminal in the field of digital manufacturing and computational materials, his combinatorial search method being able to resynthesize most complex materials through a proper combination of base components. His algorithm finds a microscale combination of base materials that approximates the deformation behavior of the input material at a mesoscopic scale. His thesis results have been published in high-ranking journals and conferences, including SIGGRAPH and Eurographics.

(2012) Ofir Weber ‘s PhD thesis, in the field of geometry processing, describes novel and efficient methods for 2D and 3D shape manipulation. It is s a rare combination of deep mathematical theory, based on complex analysis and harmonic theory, with efficient and robust  implementations on modern GPU hardware. The thesis was done at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Detail preserving shape deformation is a topic with significant research activity in the last few years. In this very competitive area, Weber managed to propose groundbreaking advances, by a combined use of the right mathematical tools and efficient implementations. He described the generalization of barycentric coordinates by using Complex Analysis, leading to a very elegant formulation and a deeper understanding of the problem. The results described in the thesis have been published in high-ranking journals and conferences, including SIGGRAPH and Eurographics, where it also received a Best Paper Award. His work is also being considered for a US patent.

(2013) Thabo Beeler’s PhD thesis targets on the acquisition of the geometry of the human faces at a very high precision under static and also dynamic conditions. Thabo Beeler has designed and build up the complete pipeline of a novel scanner hardware together with its image analysis software, with results which show a clear improvement over existing face scanning systems in terms of spatial and time resolution. His scheme is single-shot and extends to the temporal domain by using anchor frames, obtaining facial geometry at a very high quality. The work has resulted in a system being the first scanner that can handle facial hair up to a large extend, by proposing a coupled method for acquiring facial hair and skin. The thesis of Thabo Beeler has set new standards in the important field of face scanning technology. It has impacted not only the academic community but also the practice within industries. His work is internationally well recognized and the number and quality of the related publications is outstanding and hard to outperform.

(2013) David Bommes’s PhD thesis deals on the creation of high quality anisotropic quadrilateral polygon meshes, where faces are as rectangular as possible while the global mesh structure satisfies a number of additional boundary constraints such as alignment to sharp feature curves, orientation with respect to principal curvatures, as well as a simple topology with as few irregular vertices as possible. The thesis is a significant and outstanding piece of scientific work. The mesh generation problem is succesfully formulated as a global (potentially non-linear) constrained optimization problem. The achievements towards high-quality quad mesh generation result from the combination of a theoretical insight on the topological structure of quad meshes, differential geometry, and the use of recent state-of-the-art numerical solvers for constrained non-linear optimization. Besides the academic merits, the Mixed-Integer Quadrangulation technique has been successfully transferred into the industrial domain. Today, the algorithm is already included in two of the leading professional software packages for 3D modeling.

(2013) Boris Neubert’s thesis focuses on novel methods for intelligent content generation and rendering of complex scenes. Nature is a good example of a highly complex scene, challenging both in terms of model and image generation. The thesis provides strong technical contributions to different stages of a modeling and rendering pipeline in this context. In particular the thesis describes novel methods for simulation-based model generation or self-organizing modeling as coined by recent work, together with data-driven and sketch-based methods. These methods are guided by the idea of reducing the tedium of manual modeling, while still providing artistic freedom. To deal with the challenging level of complexity during rendering, the thesis presents a new method for efficient rendering based on stochastic simplification. The described results have been published in high-ranking journals and conferences including Siggraph, Siggraph Asia, and the Computer Graphics Forum Journal.

(2013) Daniele Panozzo’s PhD dissertation contributes to fill the existing gap between acquisition of surfaces from 3D scanners and their use in modeling. He has proposed several innovative approaches to automatically convert unstructured triangle meshes into dense or coarse quadrilateral meshes. The conversion process may be guided by both local features and global symmetry analysis, enabling the generation of symmetric meshes whose edges are aligned to features. Among the most relevant results of the thesis, Daniele Panozzo has proposed an algorithm for quad mesh simplification, a technique for reverse Catmull-Clark subdivision, an algorithm for producing coarse quad layouts aligned with an input field, and a method for computing generalized symmetry maps and obtaining symmetry aware quad meshes. Daniele’s contributions to interactive geometric modeling also include editing surfaces while preventing self-intersections and collisions, thus enabling the direct use of the edited meshes in conventional physical simulation and production pipelines. His thesis results have been published in top-rated journals including Eurographics and ACM Siggraph.

(2014) Francisco Gonzalez PhD thesis worked on various sampling and continuity problems arising at different stages in Computer Graphics. In particular, he studied the problem at three different stages in the traditional graphics pipeline: texturing, mesh deformation and rendering. He solved the first problem, continuity in texturing, by creating a technique that used a set of virtual triangles that seamlessly stitched the textures providing continuity in both the special and frequency domains. For the second problem, he developed a technique to use multiple cages for mesh deformation, solving the intrinsic continuity problem for current coordinate systems. For the last one, he developed a screen-space interpolation technique for accelerating the rendering of complex scenes. In every case he strived for providing practical solutions that could be used both in academia and in professional environments.

(2014) Alec Jacobson PhD thesis explored the problem of interactive shape deformation and proposed interfaces and algorithms for high-quality, real-time 2D and 3D deformation and animation. The methods developed in his thesis enable users to elastically manipulate shapes using skeletons, cages, regions and points on the shape as deformation handles in a unified framework. The deformations exhibit state-of-the-art quality while running at unprecedented frame rates thanks to a novel subspace optimization approach combined with automatic skinning. The computation of the skinning weights relies on a volumetric discretization of the shape, which is robustly enabled by an inside-outside segmentation approach that allows to consistently tetrahedralize even imperfect input meshes common in practical applications.

(2014) Cengiz Oeztirelli PhD thesis developed a novel surface definition that is efficient to compute and preserves sharp features and fine details even when the input data is heavily corrupted with noise and outliers, by reformulating the reconstruction problem with local kernel regression and utilizing robust statistics. He has also established the associated sampling conditions and proposed practical sampling algorithms, relying on a new connection between harmonic analysis and kernel methods. He has further introduced novel techniques for a unified analysis of general point distributions and synthesis algorithms that can generate multi-class distributions in general metric spaces with characteristics given or extracted from existing point patterns, based on correlations of pairs of points.

(2015) Duygu Ceylan In her PhD thesis, Duygu Ceylan pioneered new algorithms for image-based 3D reconstruction and modeling based on symmetry priors. With a focus on urban scenes, Duygu’s work combines high-level data analysis with low-level geometry extraction to significantly improve the accuracy and robustness of multi-view stereo methods.In particular, she solves the fundamental problem of correspondence ambiguity in scenes with high levels of structural repetitions, common in urban facades. Her solution is based on global optimization methods that simultaneously solve for symmetry information and the corresponding 3D reconstruction. This approach not only leads to substantial improvements in reconstruction quality, but also enables a number of high-level editing operations for urban scenes, based on the extracted symmetries. She also explored new methods to design mechanical automata from motion capture data. Duygu Ceylan’s thesis combines novel theoretical insights with efficient algorithms to solve important practical problems. The results of her thesis have been published in top-rated conferences and journals including Eurographics and ACM TOG. ————————– Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2015 PhD Award to Duygu Ceylan for her strong technical contribution to high-level shape analysis, proposing new algorithms for the automatic interpretation of architectural structures.

(2015) Belen Masia In her PhD Thesis, Belen Masia has made significant contributions to the different stages of the imaging pipeline: capture, processing, editing, and visualization. The common denominator in her work has consisted on the combination of novel hardware systems, computational algorithms, and insights from the human visual system. Her works include a new design for coded apertures to recover blurred images, reverse tone mapping operators for high dynamic displays, disparity retargeting algorithms for automultiscopic displays, a metric of visual discomfort for dynamic stereo content, or the first in-depth study about editing workflows for four-dimensional light fields. She was also a co-author of the seminal femtophotography paper that allowed in 2013 to capture light in motion, at a trillion frames per second. Belen’s thesis includes impressive advances at the theoretical and practical levels. She has already spent several months collaborating with researchers at prestigious research centers such as the Media Lab in the US, Microsoft Portugal or Tsinghua University in Beijing. Her work is internationally valued and recognized, as her exceptional publication record shows. Moreover, Belen received in 2012 the Nvidia Graduate Fellowship Award, and was chosen in 2014 by MIT Technology Review as one of the top ten innovators under 35 in Spain.

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AcSIR Best Ph.D. Thesis Award.

Ph.D. students, who have been awarded their Ph.D. degree from AcSIR during the period  January 1, 2023 to December 31, 2023 , are eligible to apply for AcSIR Best Ph.D. Thesis Award.

These awards which consists of a citation and a cash prize, will be awarded in all the five faculty disciplines.

The students, who wish to apply for these awards, must send their completed  application form  strictly in the attached word format (do not send PDF) along with copies of all  publications, patents/technology transfer/copyright   emanating only from the Ph.D. thesis-work , Thesis abstract  and  soft copy of their signed thesis  electronically to  [email protected]  not later  than April 10, 2024.

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2023 Nanotechnology Council Awards Ceremony

The IEEE Nanotechnology Council announces its 2023 Award Winners. Awards were presented at its 23rd IEEE International Conference on Nanotechnology (NANO 2023) held in Jeju, Republic of Korea on 3-5 July 2023.

The Pioneer , Early Career , Chapter of the Year , TNANO Best Paper , Technical Committee , and Best PhD Thesis awards were featured.

PIONEER AWARD IN NANOTECHNOLOGY

The NTC Pioneer Award in nanotechnology is to recognize individuals who by virtue of initiating new areas of research, development or engineering have had a significant impact on the field of nanotechnology. The award is intended for people who are in the mid or late portions of their careers, i.e., at least 10 years beyond his or her highest earned academic degree on the nomination deadline date.

2023 Pioneer Award Recipient

Xiangfeng Duan Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, UCLA

“For pioneering contribution to the synthesis and integration of nanoscale materials and devices, especially Van der Waals heterostructures and devices”

EARLY CAREER AWARD IN NANOTECHNOLOGY

The Nanotechnology Council has established an Early Career Award to recognize individuals who have made contributions with major impact on the field of nanotechnology. Up to two awards may be given per year. There may be one award for academics (persons employed by colleges or universities) and one for persons employed by industry or government organizations.

2023 Early Career Award Recipient

Deep Jariwala, Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania

“For breakthrough contributions in logic, memory and photonic devices from low-dimensional semiconductors”

CHAPTER OF THE YEAR AWARD

The winner of the Chapter of the Year Award (read more) for 2022 is the University of Saskatchewan IEEE Nanotechnology Council Student Branch Chapter.

Chair: José Alvim Berkenbrock

“For outstanding performance during adverse times and innovative and collaborative initiatives that engaged nanotechnology experts and IEEE volunteers”

TNANO BEST PAPER AWARD

At the beginning of each year, T-NANO selects a paper that appeared in the Transactions during the previous calendar year for its Best Paper Award.  Candidate papers are nominated by members of the Editorial Board.  Evaluation is done by members of the Senior Editors Panel, with criteria including technical merit, originality, potential impact on the field, clarity of presentation, and practical significance for applications.

TNANO 2022 Best Paper Award Recipients

“Edge Engineered Graphene Nanoribbons as Nanoscale Interconnect: DFT Analysis,” in IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, vol. 21, pp. 43-51, 2022, doi: 10.1109/TNANO.2021.3140041.

Authors: Sonal Agrawal and Anurag Srivastava, Advanced Nanomaterials Research Group (AMRG), Gwalior, India; Gaurav Kaushal, VLSI Design Laboratory ABV-Indian Institute of Information Technology, Management at Gwalior, Gwalior, India; Ashok Srivastava, Division of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

TECHNICAL COMMITTEE AWARD

Each year, the Council will provide an award for the best Technical Committee (TC) for the prior year.

TC-16 (Quantum, Neuromorphic, and Unconventional Computing)

Chair: Giovanni Finocchio

NTC BEST PhD THESIS AWARD IN NANOTECHNOLOGY

This annual award recognizes a PhD thesis in nanotechnology with remarkable technology innovation or excellence which should have led to publications in NTC venues including journals and conferences. The awardee will be selected by a committee composed of the Chair and three members. The Chair is appointed by the NTC President with recommendation from the VP of Educational Activities.

Chuanzhen Zhao, Ph.D. Department of Chemical Engineering, Stanford University

“For developing and applying nanoscale tools critical to chemical sensing for the BRAIN Initiative, with further applications in wearable sensors”

Chuanzhen Zhao, Ph.D., is an NIH/NIBIB NRSA F32 postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Zhenan Bao’s lab at Stanford University. Dr. Zhao currently works on developing flexible and stretchable biosensors and bioelectronics.

Dr. Zhao did his Ph.D. with Prof. Paul S. Weiss and Prof. Anne M. Andrews at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His Ph.D. research focused on developing translational biosensors, including implantable neuroprobes and wearable devices, to monitor chemical signaling in the body.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2023 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Announcement , Awards , NTC News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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