Best Dissertation Award
The Informatics Europe Best Dissertation Award (BDA) is granted annually for an excellent PhD dissertation in Informatics, carried out in one of the member universities of Informatics Europe. The objective of this Award is to stimulate young researchers by rewarding them, and to disseminate excellent research to the Informatics Europe community and beyond.
BDA 2024 was presented during the ECSS 2024 Award Ceremony in Sliema, Malta. Read the full coverage of the ceremony and the Award results here.
The Award Committee selects the winner based on the following criteria:
- the originality of the research and the methods used
- the quality of the achieved results
- the societal impact of the thesis
- the quality of the exposition
Should more than one dissertation reach an equivalent top score, the one with the highest societal impact score is selected.
The Award is sponsored by Springer and the Award winner will receive a certificate, a prize of EUR 3,000 and an invitation to publish the awarded thesis in a dedicated Springer series. The Award Committee reserves the right to award two candidates and consequently split the monetary prize between them.
The Official Award Ceremony will take place during the annual European InformatiCs LeaderS Summit (ECSS). The Award winner(s) will receive financial support to attend the Summit and present their work at the ceremony and the Professional Development Workshop for Early Career Researchers (ECRWS) during ECSS. Noteworthy runners-up may also be recognised and invited to join the Award ceremony and the ECRWS.
The Award Committee, partially renewed every year, is composed of a subset of the Board of Directors of Informatics Europe. In case a PhD thesis is submitted from an institution that the Award Committee member currently belongs to, the Committee member from that institution will not participate in the discussion and the voting of that particular submission.
Key Dates
- Submission deadline: 1 June 2024
- Notification of results to candidates: August 2024
- Award ceremony: 29 October 2024
The Award will be presented during the 20th European InformatiCs LeaderS Summit (ECSS) in Malta, between October 28-30, 2024, where the winner will be invited to give a short talk on their dissertation and share insights into their early career research experience as a speaker at the Professional Development Workshop for Early Career Researchers.
How to Submit
Nominations should be submitted by academics of the Informatics Europe member institutions. Each member can nominate at most one candidate who has defended her/his PhD in Informatics in the academic years 2022-2023 or 2023-2024, but on or before December 31, 2023. Federated members can submit only one thesis for their entire set of members.
The submission should be composed of a single PDF file containing the following information:
- Full name and affiliation of the nominee (current affiliation and institution where the nominee obtained the PhD title).
- A letter of recommendation supporting the application for the Award, from the Director/Head of the Department or Laboratory.
- Additional letters of recommendation, or the thesis evaluation reports by the members of the PhD awarding committee (with a maximum of two).
- One- or two-page summary of the nominee's dissertation (in English).
- Link to download the nominee's dissertation (in any language).
- List of nominee's publications that were used as the basis of chapters in the nominated dissertation.
- A succinct description of why the nominee is well-qualified for the award (200-500 words).
Submissions not conforming to the above rules and applications outside of the scope of the Award will be rejected without consideration.
Submission for the '24 Award is now closed. Thank you for your support!
2024 Award Committee
- Dimka Karastoyanova, University of Groningen, the Netherlands (Co-Chair)
- Harald Gall, University of Zurich, Switzerland (Co-Chair)
- Premek Brada, University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic
- Manuel Carro, Technical University of Madrid / IMDEA Software Institute, Spain
- Dympna O'Sullivan, TU Dublin, Ireland
Frequently Asked Questions
I defended my dissertation in late 2022 but graduated in 2023. Am I eligible to compete for the 2024 Award?
How many Award nominations can our university submit?
I would like to submit a nomination from our university. However, we are not a member of Informatics Europe. What options do we have?
If your department is part of our member National Informatics Associations, you can ask the respective association to endorse your candidate and support him/her as the association’s candidate. Each member association can only endorse one candidate, i.e. only one Award nomination will be considered from each member association. Check here for the list of our member National Informatics Associations.
We also highly recommend non-members to join Informatics Europe, where you can participate more closely in our ongoing activities and help build a stronger common voice in Europe to support the promotion of informatics research and education.
Our department belongs to an institution that is a federated member of Informatics Europe. Can we submit more than one Award nomination?
Further Inquires
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