Best Dissertation Award

• Submission deadline extended: 16 June 2025
• Notification of results to candidates: late August 2025
• Award ceremony: 28 October 2025

The Award winner(s) will be invited to give a short talk on their dissertation during the Award ceremony.

Nominations should be submitted by academics of the Informatics Europe member institutions. Each member may nominate one candidate who defended their PhD in Informatics in the academic years 2023-2024 or 2024-2025, but on or before December 31, 2024. Federated members can submit only one dissertation 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 - i.e. the dissertation author - obtained the PhD title).
• A letter of recommendation supporting the application for the Award from the Director/Head of the Department or Laboratory.
• Nomination brief by the submitting academic, if different from the Director/Head (a succinct description of why the nominee is well-qualified for the Award, 200-500 words).
• Dissertation review or 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 English.
• List of the nominee's publications that were used as the basis of chapters in the nominated dissertation.

Submissions must be done via the EasyChair platform: https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=iebda2025, ensuring the submitted PDF file name follows this format: “Nominee Name - Dissertation title”. Please also refer to our submission guidelines on the EasyChair platform by clicking the “Read Instructions” button.

Submissions not conforming to the above rules and applications outside of the scope of the Award will be rejected without consideration and notification.

• Premek Brada, University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic (Co-Chair)
• Dimka Karastoyanova, University of Groningen, the Netherlands (Co-Chair)
• Marco Aiello, University of Stuttgart, Germany
• Gert Jervan, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
• Ernestina Menasalvas, Technical University of Madrid, Spain

As long as the PhD dissertation in Informatics is defended in the academic years of 2023-2024 or 2024-2025, AND on or before December 31, 2024, you will be eligible to compete for the 2025 Award.

Each university department can submit only one nomination to the Award. We only consider nominations endorsed by our member institutes.

Only PhDs nominated by Informatics Europe member institutions are eligible. Not a member yet? Join us and be part of Europe’s leading Informatics community!

If your department belongs to one of our member National Informatics Associations (full list here), you may request an endorsement from the association. However, each member association may endorse only one candidate.

A federated member represents a group of up to five small academic or research institutions holding a single vote and is entitled to only one nomination for the Award.

Yes, your dissertation remains eligible for the Award. If selected as the winner, you will receive the EUR 3,000 prize or share it if there are multiple winners. You will also be invited to publish the dissertation in a dedicated Springer Series if it has not been published with an ISBN or under copyright protection. Otherwise, the invitation to publish in a dedicated Springer series will be granted to the best unpublished dissertation submitted, as determined by the Award Committee, without an additional monetary prize.