award winning thesis

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.

• Knowledge Base
• Dissertation

Prize-Winning Thesis and Dissertation Examples

Published on September 9, 2022 by Tegan George . Revised on July 18, 2023.

It can be difficult to know where to start when writing your thesis or dissertation . One way to come up with some ideas or maybe even combat writer’s block is to check out previous work done by other students on a similar thesis or dissertation topic to yours.

This article collects a list of undergraduate, master’s, and PhD theses and dissertations that have won prizes for their high-quality research.

Instantly correct all language mistakes in your text

Upload your document to correct all your mistakes in minutes

Table of contents

Award-winning undergraduate theses, award-winning master’s theses, award-winning ph.d. dissertations, other interesting articles.

University : University of Pennsylvania Faculty : History Author : Suchait Kahlon Award : 2021 Hilary Conroy Prize for Best Honors Thesis in World History Title : “Abolition, Africans, and Abstraction: the Influence of the “Noble Savage” on British and French Antislavery Thought, 1787-1807”

University : Columbia University Faculty : History Author : Julien Saint Reiman Award : 2018 Charles A. Beard Senior Thesis Prize Title : “A Starving Man Helping Another Starving Man”: UNRRA, India, and the Genesis of Global Relief, 1943-1947

University: University College London Faculty: Geography Author: Anna Knowles-Smith Award:  2017 Royal Geographical Society Undergraduate Dissertation Prize Title:  Refugees and theatre: an exploration of the basis of self-representation

University: University of Washington Faculty:  Computer Science & Engineering Author: Nick J. Martindell Award: 2014 Best Senior Thesis Award Title:  DCDN: Distributed content delivery for the modern web

Here's why students love Scribbr's proofreading services

Discover proofreading & editing

University:  University of Edinburgh Faculty:  Informatics Author:  Christopher Sipola Award:  2018 Social Responsibility & Sustainability Dissertation Prize Title:  Summarizing electricity usage with a neural network

University:  University of Ottawa Faculty:  Education Author:  Matthew Brillinger Award:  2017 Commission on Graduate Studies in the Humanities Prize Title:  Educational Park Planning in Berkeley, California, 1965-1968

University:  University of Ottawa Faculty: Social Sciences Author:  Heather Martin Award:  2015 Joseph De Koninck Prize Title:  An Analysis of Sexual Assault Support Services for Women who have a Developmental Disability

University : University of Ottawa Faculty : Physics Author : Guillaume Thekkadath Award : 2017 Commission on Graduate Studies in the Sciences Prize Title : Joint measurements of complementary properties of quantum systems

University:  London School of Economics Faculty: International Development Author: Lajos Kossuth Award:  2016 Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance Title:  Shiny Happy People: A study of the effects income relative to a reference group exerts on life satisfaction

University : Stanford University Faculty : English Author : Nathan Wainstein Award : 2021 Alden Prize Title : “Unformed Art: Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel”

University : University of Massachusetts at Amherst Faculty : Molecular and Cellular Biology Author : Nils Pilotte Award : 2021 Byron Prize for Best Ph.D. Dissertation Title : “Improved Molecular Diagnostics for Soil-Transmitted Molecular Diagnostics for Soil-Transmitted Helminths”

University:  Utrecht University Faculty:  Linguistics Author:  Hans Rutger Bosker Award: 2014 AVT/Anéla Dissertation Prize Title:  The processing and evaluation of fluency in native and non-native speech

University: California Institute of Technology Faculty: Physics Author: Michael P. Mendenhall Award: 2015 Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics Title: Measurement of the neutron beta decay asymmetry using ultracold neutrons

University:  Stanford University Faculty: Management Science and Engineering Author:  Shayan O. Gharan Award:  Doctoral Dissertation Award 2013 Title:   New Rounding Techniques for the Design and Analysis of Approximation Algorithms

University: University of Minnesota Faculty: Chemical Engineering Author: Eric A. Vandre Award:  2014 Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award in Fluid Dynamics Title: Onset of Dynamics Wetting Failure: The Mechanics of High-speed Fluid Displacement

University: Erasmus University Rotterdam Faculty: Marketing Author: Ezgi Akpinar Award: McKinsey Marketing Dissertation Award 2014 Title: Consumer Information Sharing: Understanding Psychological Drivers of Social Transmission

University: University of Washington Faculty: Computer Science & Engineering Author: Keith N. Snavely Award:  2009 Doctoral Dissertation Award Title: Scene Reconstruction and Visualization from Internet Photo Collections

University:  University of Ottawa Faculty:  Social Work Author:  Susannah Taylor Award: 2018 Joseph De Koninck Prize Title:  Effacing and Obscuring Autonomy: the Effects of Structural Violence on the Transition to Adulthood of Street Involved Youth

If you want to know more about AI for academic writing, AI tools, or research bias, make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

Research bias

• Survivorship bias
• Self-serving bias
• Availability heuristic
• Halo effect
• Hindsight bias
• Deep learning
• Generative AI
• Machine learning
• Reinforcement learning
• Supervised vs. unsupervised learning

 (AI) Tools

• Grammar Checker
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Text Summarizer
• AI Detector
• Plagiarism Checker
• Citation Generator

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

George, T. (2023, July 18). Prize-Winning Thesis and Dissertation Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved September 27, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/dissertation/examples/

Is this article helpful?

Tegan George

Other students also liked, how to choose a dissertation topic | 8 steps to follow, checklist: writing a dissertation, thesis & dissertation database examples, "i thought ai proofreading was useless but..".

I've been using Scribbr for years now and I know it's a service that won't disappoint. It does a good job spotting mistakes”

Harvard University Theses, Dissertations, and Prize Papers

The Harvard University Archives ’ collection of theses, dissertations, and prize papers document the wide range of academic research undertaken by Harvard students over the course of the University’s history.

Beyond their value as pieces of original research, these collections document the history of American higher education, chronicling both the growth of Harvard as a major research institution as well as the development of numerous academic fields. They are also an important source of biographical information, offering insight into the academic careers of the authors.

Spanning from the ‘theses and quaestiones’ of the 17th and 18th centuries to the current yearly output of student research, they include both the first Harvard Ph.D. dissertation (by William Byerly, Ph.D . 1873) and the dissertation of the first woman to earn a doctorate from Harvard ( Lorna Myrtle Hodgkinson , Ed.D. 1922).

Other highlights include:

• The collection of Mathematical theses, 1782-1839
• The 1895 Ph.D. dissertation of W.E.B. Du Bois, The suppression of the African slave trade in the United States, 1638-1871
• Ph.D. dissertations of astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (Ph.D. 1925) and physicist John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (Ph.D. 1922)
• Undergraduate honors theses of novelist John Updike (A.B. 1954), filmmaker Terrence Malick (A.B. 1966),  and U.S. poet laureate Tracy Smith (A.B. 1994)
• Undergraduate prize papers and dissertations of philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson (A.B. 1821), George Santayana (Ph.D. 1889), and W.V. Quine (Ph.D. 1932)
• Undergraduate honors theses of U.S. President John F. Kennedy (A.B. 1940) and Chief Justice John Roberts (A.B. 1976)

What does a prize-winning thesis look like?

If you're a Harvard undergraduate writing your own thesis, it can be helpful to review recent prize-winning theses. The Harvard University Archives has made available for digital lending all of the Thomas Hoopes Prize winners from the 2019-2021 academic years.

Accessing These Materials

How to access materials at the Harvard University Archives

How to find and request dissertations, in person or virtually

How to find and request undergraduate honors theses

How to find and request Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize papers

How to find and request Bowdoin Prize papers

• email: Email
• Phone number 617-495-2461

Related Collections

Harvard faculty personal and professional archives, harvard student life collections: arts, sports, politics and social life, access materials at the harvard university archives.

DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

• Undergraduate
• Honors Thesis

Award Winning Theses

The following theses are recent examples of outstanding work:.

• Avery Goods:  "An Inconvenient Group: The Effect of Motivated Messages on Climate Change Attitudes and Behaviors of Skeptic Audiences" 2019 Janda Prize Winner for Best Honors Thesis
• Joshua Varcie: "The Artificial Incumbency Advantage: How Bipartisan Redistricting Schemes Protect Incumbents" 2019   Janda Prize Honorable Mention for Distinguished Honors Thesis
• Benjamin Alan Weinberg: " Ballot Challenge: Explaining Voting Rights Restrictions in 21st-Century America"  2018 Janda Prize Winner for Best Honors Thesis
• Logan Scott Peretz:  "How Hillary May Have Lost the White House: The Electoral Effects of Presidential Campaign Visits in 2016"  2018   Janda Prize Honorable Mention for Distinguished Honors Thesis
• Aaron Gordon: "An Empirical Appraisal of the Liberty of Contract"  2017 Janda Prize Winner for Best Honors Thesis
• Hayley Hopkins: "Restrict the Vote: Disenfranchisement as a Political Strategy" 2017 Janda Prize Winner for Best Honors Thesis
• Matthew Gates: "Ideological Basis for the Gay Rights Movement"  2017   Janda Prize Honorable Mention for Distinguished Honors Thesis
• Elena Barham: "Passing the Buck: World Bank Anti-Corruption Reform and the Politics of Implementation" 2016 Janda Prize Winner for Best Honors Thesis
• Remy Smith: "Inherently Unequal: The Effects of Equal Representation on Senate Policy Outcomes" 2016 Janda Prize Honorable Mention for Distinguished Honors Thesis
• Laura Rozier:  "The Media, the Innocent, and the Public: A Nuanced Look at Exonerations and Public Opinion of the Death Penalty"   2015 Janda Prize Winner for Best Honors Thesis
• Kaitlyn Chriswell: “Cross-cutting cleavages: Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Terra Lliure, and the centrality of networks” , 2014 Janda Prize Winner for Best Honors Thesis
• Jordan Fein:  "Searching for Health Care Reform: Studying Media Coverage and Framing Public Opinion of the 2009-2010 Health Care Debate" , 2011 Janda Prize Winner for Best Honors Thesis
• Dylan Lewis:  “Unpaid Protectors: Volunteerism and the Diminishing Role of Federal Responsibility in the National Park Service” , 2011 Janda Prize Honorable Mention for Distinguished Honors Thesis
• Benjamin Zhu:  “Resource Distribution in Post‐PRI Mexico: De‐Politicized or Re‐Politicized?” , 2011 Senior Marshall for Distinguished Honors Thesis
• Ben Armstrong:  “Ne Touche Pas Ma Constitution: Pressures and Presidential Term Limits” , 2011 Barry Farrell Prize for Academic Achievement
• Jeffrey Paller:  “Where are the people? The Relationship between Government and Civil Society in South Africa” , 2006 Janda Prize Co-Winner for Best Honors Thesis
• Samir Mayekar:  “The Piquetero Effect: Examining the Argentine Government’s Response to the Piquetero Movement” , 2006 Janda Prize Co-Winner for Best Honors Thesis 


Janda PRIZE for DISTINGUISHED Honors Thesis REcipients

The Kenneth F. Janda Prize for Distinguished Honors Thesis in Political Science  is awarded annually for the best undergraduate Honors thesis of the year.

Hire From Us

PGP in Building Information Modelling (BIM) for Architects

Pgp in parametric design for architects, pgp in building information modelling (bim) for civil engineers.

Become a Mentor

Career Counselling

Join thousands of people who organise work and life with Novatr.

10 Award-Winning Architecture Thesis Projects From Around The World

Neha Sharma

8 mins read

It is always interesting to see the architecture thesis projects students come up with every year. With each passing batch, there is more knowledge passed down and a better base to begin. The result is a rise in innovation and creativity by students, and overall a better mix!

Architecture thesis is an ordeal all students are intimidated by. From choosing an architecture thesis topic all the way to giving a great final thesis review , every step is equally challenging and important. It is that turn in an architecture student’s life that pushes them to churn out their best. Therefore, it is inevitable to come across some life-altering design solutions through architecture theses across the world.

To identify and appreciate these exceptional final projects by architecture students, many organisations across the world like Archistart, Council of Architecture, etcetera, award recognition for excellence in architecture thesis and also grant financial support for further research to the projects worthy of being realised.

Read through the list of 10 such award-winning architecture theses across the world with links to study them in detail!

1. ISTHME // Le CHAOS SENSIBLE - Dafni Filippa and Meriam Sehimi

ISTHME // Le Chaos Sensible - Architecture Thesis of the Year 2020 (Source: www.nonarchitecture.eu)

Starting from the most recent one, the award-winning thesis is a proposal of a mixed-use building in the capital city of Ghana, Africa, that aims to cater to a large spectrum of functions of the Ghanaian community, especially living, commercial, sports and leisure.

This culturally thoughtful architecture thesis project is an honest effort to celebrate the African spirit and empower the local community, which reflects in the ‘sensible chaos’ of the design.

2. INFRA-PAISAJE: New Landscape Architecture - Luis Bendezu

INFRA-PAISAJE: New Landscape Infrastructure for San Juan de Marcona - Special Mention: Architectural Thesis Award ATA 2018 (Source: www.archistart.net)

Landscape architecture manifests the connection between humans and nature. The landscape thesis project proposes a series of technical elements for the creation of a seamless landscape between the urbanised territory of San Juan de Marcona in Peru and the suburban parts, thus forming a cohesive townscape which converses with the coastline and brings active life to the otherwise desolate expanse of the region.

3. Water Exploratorium - Satyam Gyanchandani

Water Exploratorium - Ace of Space Design Awards: Outstanding Student Thesis Award (Source: www.architectandinteriorsindia.com)

Water is a life-giving resource and considered sacred across many cultures. To sustain life on earth, it is important to save and use it with utmost efficiency. The architecture thesis project showcases experiential design through and for water. It also tackles design challenges like infotainment by educating visitors on water conservation and creating a static built form for an element as fluid as water for a wholesome sensory experience.

Want to know how to come up with such fascinating thesis topics? Read: 7 Tips on Choosing the Perfect Architecture Thesis Topic For You

4. Architecture for Blind People - Mariagiorgia Pisano

Between Light and Shadow: Architecture for Blind People - 1st Place: Architectural Thesis Award 2017 (Source: www.archistart.net)

Inclusive design offers a wide-spread net of research opportunities and is gaining much-needed recognition today!

Design for people with disabilities is dealt with empathy in this architecture thesis project, where the focus is exploring innovative design solutions for the visually deprived and getting the design of rehabilitation centres as close as possible to meeting their needs.

5. Mosul Postwar Camp - Edoardo Daniele Stuggiu and Stefano Lombardi

Mosul Postwar Camp - 1st Place: Architectural Thesis Award ATA 2019 (Source: www.archistart.net)

War does permanent damage to a person’s mental health. The survivors experience trauma, loss and even destruction of self-identity. The architecture thesis project proposes a postwar camp at Mosul, Iraq, aiming to create a place where people of various backgrounds can peacefully coexist and build a community based on humanitarian values to prevent war in the future.

6. Consolation through Architecture - A New Journey through the Abandoned Landscapes of Varanasi - Navin Lucas Sebastian

Consolation Through Architecture - COA National Awards for Excellence in Architectural Thesis 2016 (Source: www.coa.gov.in)

The intangible aspects of design are tough to pinpoint but necessary for the essence and feel of it. This urban design thesis project shows light on architecture’s influence on one’s emotions with the holy city of Varanasi in India as the backdrop. With a focus on issues arising due to the city’s cremation grounds, the thesis explores innovative and sustainable solutions for the same.

7. Unfinished Tor Vergata Scenario - Carmelo Gagliano

Unfinished Tor Vergata Scenario - 1st Place: Architectural Thesis Award 2020 (Source: www.archistart.net)

When it comes to building projects, the trend of the ‘unfinished’ is something Italy has been increasingly seeing in the past few years. The most popular unfinished public work is Calatrava’s Olympic Stadium, which is the main object for reuse in the proposal of a science museum at Rome Tor Vergata.

This architecture thesis project explores the existing building trends of the region, aims to reinvent the iconic building and become a scientific attraction for tourists and locals.

8. Chachapoyas Peri-Urban Park - Nájat Jishar Fernández Díaz

Structures for Incidents in Nature: Chachapoyas Peri-Urban Park - Special Mention: Architectural Thesis Award ATA 2019 (Source: www.archistart.net)

Growing urban areas are a concern as they slowly consume the ecology surrounding them. Chachapoyas (forest of clouds) in Peru faces a similar problem from the expanding urban confinements which are slowly taking over the beautiful landscapes for which the place is particularly famous.

The project aims to mend the damage by connecting every speck of open land available in the region and converting it into a network of green corridors, making for an interesting urban planning thesis!

9. Garden of Reconciliation, Kashmir - Jay Shah

Garden of Reconciliation: Miniature Drawing - COA National Award in Excellence for Architectural Thesis 2018 (Source: www.uni.xyz)

Cultural and political unrest in a region has always been the glue for controversies, leading to public tip-toeing around such topics. This bold architecture thesis project looks at the conflicted region of Kashmir, to analyse its cultural, social and artistic practices and then come up with an architecture program best suited for the region. This is traversed in the form of a mixed-use landscape that aims to find a solution and is not the solution itself!

Such theses usually require intensive site studies. Read: Site Analysis Categories You Need to Cover For Your Architecture Thesis Project to know more.

10. Adaptive Reuse of STP Grain Silos - Alila Mhamed

Poudrière Community Hub - 2nd Place: Architectural Thesis Awards ATA 2020 (Source: www.archistart.net)

Adaptive reuse of spaces that have been uninhabited for a long time does true justice to the core values of architecture and design. This thesis project explores the creative redefinition of the old STP Grain silos complex, the first mill constructed as a part of the Poudrière industrial park in the present-day city of Sfax, Tuscany, Italy, by converting it into a mixed-use hub for art, commerce, trade, administration and collaboration.

Numerous amazing architecture thesis projects come to light every year and the list is not limited to this one! At the learning stages, people have the power to unleash their creativity without any limitations and such scenarios might just lead to the right solutions for the time and society we live in.

Giving your architecture thesis project? Check out our A-Z Architecture Thesis Guide!

Stay updated with interesting insights and episodes on architecture thesis projects with Novatr's Resources !

Join 100,000 designers who read us every month

Related articles

7 Tips on Choosing the Perfect Architecture Thesis Topic For You

Site Analysis Categories You Need to Cover For Your Architecture Thesis Project

How to Give a Fantastic Architecture Thesis Review That Stands Out

All Articles

Your next chapter in AEC begins with Novatr!

Ready to skyrocket your career?

As you would have gathered, we are here to help you take the industry by storm with advanced, tech-first skills.

Privacy Policy

Terms of Use

Award-winning Theses and Dissertations

Permanent uri for this collection.

• 2016: "Virginia Tech Graduate School honors top scholars of the 2015-16 academic year"
• 2013: "Laura Gambrel, Justin Lemkul receive 2013 Outstanding Dissertation Award"
• 2012: "Robert Neal and Catherine Larochelle receive 2012 Outstanding Dissertation Awards from Graduate School"
• 2011: "Nikkhah wins best dissertation for identification of cell biomechanical signatures"
• 2011: "Graduate students receive William Preston Society Thesis awards"
• 2010: "Graduate School selects outstanding master's research from Class of 2010"

Recent Submissions

• 1 (current)

Selected Architecture Thesis Projects: Fall 2020

Clockwise from top left: “Citing the Native Genius” by Taylor Cook, “Pair of Dice, Para-Dice, Paradise: A Counter-Memorial to Victims of Police Brutality” by Calvin Boyd, “The Magic Carpet” by Goli Jalali, “Stacked Daydreams: Ceiling-Scape for the Neglected” by Zai Xi Jeffrey Wong, and “Up from the Past: Housing as Reparations on Chicago’s South Side” by Isabel Strauss

Five films showcase a selection of Fall 2020 thesis projects from the Department of Architecture.

Pair of Dice, Para-Dice, Paradise: A Counter-Memorial to Victims of Police Brutality

This thesis is a proposal for a counter-memorial to victims of police brutality. The counter-memorial addresses scale by being both local and national, addresses materiality by privileging black aesthetics over politeness, addresses presence/absence by being more transient than permanent, and lastly, addresses site by being collective rather than singular. The result is an architecture that plays itself out over 18,000 police stations across America and the Washington Monument at the National Mall, two sites that are intrinsically linked through the architecture itself: negative “voids” at police stations whose positive counterparts aggregate at the Mall.

The critical question here is whether or not the system in which police brutality takes place can be reformed from within, or if people of color need to seek their utopia outside of these too-ironclad structures. This counter-memorial, when understood as an instrument of accountability (and therefore a real-time beacon that measures America’s capacity to either change or otherwise repeat the same violent patterns), ultimately provides us with an eventual answer.

Author: Calvin Boyd, MArch I 2020 Advisor: Jon Lott , Assistant Professor of Architecture Duration: 11 min, 2 sec

Thesis Helpers: Shaina Yang (MArch I 2021), Rachel Coulomb (MArch I 2022)

The Magic Carpet

The Persian Carpet and the Persian Miniature painting have served as representation tools for the Persian Gar­den and the idea of paradise in Persian culture since antiquity. The word paradise derives from the Persian word pari-daeza meaning “walled enclosure.” The garden is always walled and stands in opposition to its landscape. This thesis investigates the idea of a contemporary image of paradise in the Iranian imagination by using carpets and miniature paintings as a tool for designing architecture. The garden, with its profound associations, provided a world of metaphor for the classical mystic poets. One of the manuscripts describing the Persian garden is called Haft Paykar – known as the Seven Domes – written by the 12th century Persian poet called Nizami. These types of manuscripts were made for Persian kings and contain within them miniature paintings and poetry describing battles, romances, tragedies, and triumphs that compromise Iran’s mythical and pre-Islamic history. The carpet is the repeating object in the minia­ture paintings of the manuscript. This thesis deconstructs the carpet in seven ways in order to digitally reconstruct the miniature paintings of the Seven Domes and the image of paradise with new techniques.

Author: Goli Jalali, MArch I 2021 Advisor: Jennifer Bonner , Associate Professor of Architecture Duration: 8min, 28 sec

Up from the Past: Housing as Reparations on Chicago’s South Side

Do people know what the Illinois Institute of Technology and the South Side Planning Board and the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois and the United States government did to the Black Metropolis? If they know, do they care? Is it too hard to hold these entities accountable? If we held them accountable, could we find justice for those that were displaced? What would justice look like? What comes after Mecca? What types of spaces come after Mecca? Are they different than what was there before? Are they already there? What defines them? Can Reparations be housing? How many people are already doing this work? How many people are doing this work in academia? On the ground? Is the word “Reparations” dead? What do we draw from? Who is this for? Do white men own the legacy of the architecture that defined the Black Metropolis? How personal should this work be? How anecdotal? How quantitative? Does the design need to be inherently spatial? Or atmospheric? What should it feel like? How do I draw a feeling in Rhino? What are radical ways of looking? How do we reclaim racialized architecture? Do we? Should we even talk about these things?

Author: Isabel Strauss, MArch I 2021 Advisor: Oana Stanescu , Design Critic in Architecture Duration: 4 min, 4 sec

Soundtrack Created By: Edward Davis (@DJ Eway) Production Support: Adam Maserow , Evan Orf , Glen Marquardt Collaborators: Rekha Auguste Nelson , Farnoosh Rafaie , Zena Mariem Mengesha , Edward Davis (DJ Eway) Special Thanks: Caleb Negash , Tara Oluwafemi , Maggie Janik , Ann Whiteside , Dana McKinney Guidance: Stephen Gray , John Peterson , Chris Herbert , Cecilia Conrad , Lawrence J. Vale , Ilan Strauss , Mark Lee , Iman Fayyad , Jennifer Bonner , Mindy Pugh , Peter Martinez Collage Credits: Adler and Sullivan , Bisa Butler , Carrie Mae Weems , Dawoud Bey , Deborah Roberts , Ebony G Patterson , Ellen Gallagher , Frank Lloyd Wright , Howardena Pindell , Jordan Casteel , Kerry James Marshall , Latoya Ruby Frazier , Lelaine Foster , Lorna Simpson , Mark Bradford , Mickalene Thomas , Mies van der Rohe , Nick Cave , Njideka Akunyili Crosby , Romare Bearden , Sadie Barnette More Information: architectureofreparations.cargo.site

Stacked Daydreams: Ceiling‐Scape for the Neglected

Elderly Care Adaptive Reuse of Hong Kong’s Vertical Factory

This thesis operates at the intersection of three domains of neglect:

• In the realm of building elements, the ceiling is often considered as an afterthought in the design process.
• Across building types, the vertical factory sits abandoned and anachronistic to its surroundings. It spiraled into disuse due to Hong Kong’s shifting economic focus.
• In society, the elderly are often subjected to social neglect, seen as a financial burden, and forced toward the fringes of society.

These parts experience obsolescence that led to indifference, and subsequently to boredom. I intend to draw the parallel of deterioration between the body of the elderly and the body of the vertical factory. Using a set of ceiling parts in the manner of prosthetics to reactivate the spaces into elderly care facilities, revert boredom to daydreams, and reimagine the concept of elderhood as an experimental second stage of life.

Author: Zai Xi Jeffrey Wong, MArch I AP 2021 Advisor: Eric Höweler , Associate Professor of Architecture & Architecture Thesis Coordinator Duration: 4 min, 53 sec

Citing the Native Genius

Reconstructing vernacular architecture in Hawai’i

For over 120 years, Americanization has tried to demean and erase Hawaiian language, culture, and architecture. In contemporary discourse, the vernacular architecture of Hawai’i is mostly referred to as ancient and vague. As with many Indigenous cultures, Western perspectives tend to fetishize or patronize the Hawaiian design aesthetic. Within this hierarchy of knowledge is a systemic assumption that Hawaiian vernacular architecture cannot effectively serve as a precedent resource for contemporary architects. Those who do reference the original vernacular will often classify it as utilitarian or resourceful. Regardless of intent, this narrative takes design agency away from the people involved. As a corrective, a respectful use of vernacular domestic form would benefit designers that are struggling to connect with Hawai’i’s cultural and architectural traditions.

Mining the European gaze and influence out of revivalist publications, archeological surveys and historic images reveal unique characteristics of Hawaiian domestic space. Geometric quotation and symbolic referencing are the foundational instruments in applying the discrete components, form, and organizational logic of the vernacular. The result is a design process that creates an amalgamation of decolonized form and contemporary technique. This residential project intends to revive Hawai’i’s erased domestic experience by revisiting the precolonial vernacular form and plan.

Author: Taylor Cook, MArch I 2021 Advisor: Jeffry Burchard , Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture Duration: 5 min, 13 sec

Special Thanks: Jeffry Burchard, Cameron Wu, Kanoa Chung, Nik Butterbaugh, Carly Yong, Vernacular Pacific LLC More Information: www.vernacularhawaii.com

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the galleries in Gund Hall have been turned ‘inside out,’ with exhibitions shown through a series of exterior projections on the building’s facade. View some images from the screening of these films below:

• Faculty Advisory Network
• Research Assistantships and Financial Support
• STP Certificate Program
• Research to Policy Engagement Initiative

TPP student research spans many domains, but shares methodologies and goals. Examples of award-winning theses and noteworthy research projects are shared here. We also maintain a public database of all TPP thesis titles, with links to web publications where available.

Award-Winning Theses and Student Research Stories

2024 thesis prize winners.

• Michael Giovanniello; “Modeling and Implementation of the U.S. Hydrogen Production Credit” (2024). Advisor(s): Dharik Mallapragada; Ruaridh Macdonald.
• Kailin Graham; “Doing the Dirty Work: Employment vulnerability to the energy transition implications for climate policy and politics” (2024). Advisor(s): Christopher R. Knittel.

2023 Thesis Prize Winner

• Maja Svanberg; “ The Economic Advantage of Computer Vision Over Human Labor, and Its Market Implications ” (2023). Advisor(s): Neil Thompson.

2022 Thesis Prize Winners

• Farri T. Gaba; “ Solutions to the Generalized UAV Delivery Routing Problem for Last-Mile Delivery with Societal Constraints ” (2022). Advisor(s): Matthias Winkenbach
• Jonathan Garrett Novak; “ Policy and Design Courses of Action to Improve Resilience of Proliferated Low Earth Orbit Constellations Against Adverse Solar Weather ” (2022). Advisor(s): Daniel E Hastings.
• Aaron Matthew Schwartz; “ The Role of Natural Gas in Future Low-Carbon Energy Systems ” (2022). Advisor(s): Dharik S Mallapragada.

2021 Thesis Prize Winner

Karan Bhuwalka, recent TPP alum who won best thesis in 2021, reflects on TPP’s interdisciplinary approach and bringing data science, manufacturing, and social issues together in his research on the materials that make up electric vehicles.

• Assessing the Socio-Economic Risks in Electric Vehicle Supply Chains (Thesis)
• Characterizing the Changes in Material Use due to Vehicle Electrification (Environmental Science & Technology, Jul 2021)

Do native ads shape our perception of the news?: Manon Revel

Often masquerading as legitimate news, so-called “native” ads, pushed by content recommendation networks, have brought badly needed revenue to the struggling U.S. news industry. But at what cost? TPP alum Manon Revel is now a PhD student in the IDSS Social and Engineering Systems PhD program . Her TPP thesis advisor was Prof. Ali Jadbabaie.

• Combining AI with passions (MIT News, March 2019)

Health Savings of Renewable Energy: Emil Dimanchev

Research from TPP alum Emil Dimanchev, who won TPP’s best thesis award in 2019, found that health savings from cleaner air would more than pay for the cost of implementing renewable energy policies. His thesis was advised by TPP director Noelle Selin.

• Shift to renewable electricity a win-win at statewide level (MIT News, Aug 2019)

Thesis Database

Thesis Titles, 1977 to 2015

MIT Technology and Policy Program Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 617-253-7693

• Accessibility
• Application Process
• Admissions FAQ
• Sample Elective Subjects for STP
• STP Certificate Sample Capstone Project Publication Options

• Technical Support
• Find My Rep

You are here

Writing the Winning Thesis or Dissertation A Step-by-Step Guide

• Randy L. Joyner - Appalachian State University, North Carolina, East Carolina University, USA, Virginia Tech, USA
• William A. Rouse
• Allan A. Glatthorn
• Description

The classic step-by-step guide to thesis and dissertation success, fully updated for 2018.   From selecting your topic to defending your finished work, a masters thesis or doctoral dissertation is a major undertaking. Since 1998, this book has been the go-to resource for scholars seeking guidance and best practices at every phase of the process.  This revised and updated fourth edition is the most comprehensive guide yet to researching, writing, and publishing a successful thesis or dissertation. It includes: 

• Insights on leveraging new technologies to maximize your efficiency. 
• Current case studies demonstrating the book’s teachings in action. 
• Tested principles of effective planning, an engaging writing style, defense preparation, and more.  

Written in an easy, digestible style perfect for a thesis or dissertation-writer’s busy schedule, this latest edition of a contemporary classic belongs on every advanced degree candidate’s shelf. 

Dr. Joyner and Dr. Rouse have again put together an in-depth, comprehensive, and practical guide that is a valuable resource for graduate students. This edition includes important information related to current and emerging trends in technology and valuable case studies focusing on the most common problems encountered in writing at the master’s and doctoral levels.   James R. Machell, Dean College of Education and Professional Studies, University of Central Oklahoma  Writing the Winning Dissertation  is an essential guidebook for students writing a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation. I used the first edition to write an award-winning dissertation and now use the updated edition with the doctoral students I advise. I highly recommend it to both students and advisors. Susan Colby, Director of Faculty Professional Development, Appalachian State University; Boone, NC Appalachian State University 

See what’s new to this edition by selecting the Features tab on this page. Should you need additional information or have questions regarding the HEOA information provided for this title, including what is new to this edition, please email [email protected] . Please include your name, contact information, and the name of the title for which you would like more information. For information on the HEOA, please go to http://ed.gov/policy/highered/leg/hea08/index.html .

For assistance with your order: Please email us at [email protected] or connect with your SAGE representative.

SAGE 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, CA 91320 www.sagepub.com

Dr. Joyner and Dr. Rouse have again put together an in-depth, comprehensive, and practical guide that is a valuable resource for graduate students. In addition to the excellent information provided in earlier editions, this edition also includes important information related to current and emerging trends in technology and valuable case studies focusing on the most common problems encountered in writing at the master’s and doctoral levels. If you are embarking on a thesis or dissertation, use this most valuable of resources to avoid the pitfalls inherent in the process.

Writing the Winning Dissertation is an essential guidebook for students writing a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation. I used the first edition to write an award-winning dissertation and now use the updated edition with the doctoral students I advise. Each chapter of this cogent and comprehensive book addresses crucial elements that lead to success. I highly recommend it to both students and advisors.

In this book, Joyner, Rouse, and Glatthorn thoroughly introduce and explore writing a thesis or a dissertation – walking the reader through every path and pitfall imaginable.  It is a must-read for anyone starting one of these writing processes and a good read for the faculty working with them.

This book provides a comprehensive guide to the entire process, from selecting a research topic to the final defence. Its practical advice, clear examples, and step-by-step approach make complex concepts accessible and manageable. Adding this book to the reading list will equip postgraduate students with essential tools and strategies to successfully navigate the dissertation process, enabling them to produce high-quality, impactful research.

This book will be recommended as a resource for all thesis and dissertation candidates.

The perfect book for a Thesis Proposal course!

Clear explanations, well set out, easy to follow advice.

Greta for undergrads and post grads alike. Motivational and clear examples plus useful advice to follow

Excellent book and insightful for my students.

This book offers a thorough and detailed look at how to develop a research project. It is suited to those studying in US universities, as terminology and some of the focal points relate to this.

Preview this book

Select a purchasing option.

This title is also available on SAGE Knowledge , the ultimate social sciences online library. If your library doesn’t have access, ask your librarian to start a trial .

• Library Home
• Library Catalog
• Article ILL
• Research Guides
• Finding Student Award-Winning Thesis Work
• Finding Recent Winners

Finding Student Award-Winning Thesis Work: Finding Recent Winners

• About the Awards
• Browsing Winners by Program

Step 1: Find your author

Use the full lists of award winners for 2022, 2021, and 2020 below. Look for the name of your program (ex: "Master of Interior Architecture" or "Bachelor of Design Studies"). The prize winner will be listed as "Recipient," and other recognized students will be listed as "Commends" or "Commendations." 

• 2022 Awards Ceremony Booklet Graduate program winners are on pages 6-8. Undergraduate program winners are on pages 10-11.
• 2021 Student Awards Winners
• 2020 Student Awards Winners

Step 2: Locate their work

Log into DSpace, the BAC's online repository for thesis and other student work.

On the right hand side, under Browse, select "Authors" and look for your author's name.

Click on their project's title to view its full record.

On the project record page, select "View/Open" to download their project document. 

• << Previous: About the Awards
• Next: Browsing Winners by Program >>
• Last Updated: Jun 20, 2024 3:08 PM
• URL: https://the-bac.libguides.com/prize-thesis-finder

Lydon and O'Leary libraries will be closing at 2:00pm on Wednesday, July 3rd , and will be closed on Thursday, July 4th . If you have any questions, please contact [email protected] .

• University of Massachusetts Lowell
• University Libraries

Exemplary Dissertations in Education Research

• Award Winning Dissertations
• Dissertation Awards, Grants, and Funding
• Accessing Dissertations

Why Exemplary?

"Had we been charged with identifying the 'most outstanding' dissertation, I think we would have had a more difficult time reaching consensus. The emphasis on 'exemplary'  was deliberate; while there could easily be differences of opinion about which dissertation is the 'best,' I think there could be little disputing the judgment that all five of the award-winning selections are exemplary, and can serve as models of high-quality research within their disciplines for others to follow. By identifying exemplary dissertations, the Spencer Foundation hopes to elevate the quality of dissertation research and writing that will be pursued in the future." 

- Adam Gamoran, Spencer Fellowship Committee for Awarded Dissertations

Awarded Dissertations

Recipients of the American Educational Research Association award:

• Amanda Agan,   Returns to Community
• Andrew Belasco, Creating College Opportunity
• Carolyn Barber, Recognizing High Achievement in Context

Recipients of the Bobby Wright Dissertation Award , Association for the Study of Higher Education

• Amalia Dache-Gerbino, The Labyrinth in the Metropole
• Tara Hudson,  Interpersonalizing Cultural Differences
• Stephany Brett Dunstan, Influence of Speaking a Dialect of Appalachian English on the College Experience

Lists of Award Recipients

Dissertations awarded grant support by AERA,  (American Educational Research Association)

     Funded Dissertation Grants

Dissertations awarded grant support by the Association for Institutional Research ( AIR ).

    Funded Dissertation Grants

• Awarded Dissertations from the Spencer Foundation
• Next: Dissertation Awards, Grants, and Funding >>
• Last Updated: Sep 20, 2024 2:26 PM
• URL: https://libguides.uml.edu/edphdthesis

How To Write A Dissertation Or Thesis

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) Expert Reviewed By: Dr Eunice Rautenbach | June 2020

How To Write A Dissertation: 8 Steps

• Clearly understand what a dissertation (or thesis) is
• Find a unique and valuable research topic
• Craft a convincing research proposal
• Write up a strong introduction chapter
• Review the existing literature and compile a literature review
• Design a rigorous research strategy and undertake your own research
• Present the findings of your research
• Draw a conclusion and discuss the implications

Step 1: Understand exactly what a dissertation is

This probably sounds like a no-brainer, but all too often, students come to us for help with their research and the underlying issue is that they don’t fully understand what a dissertation (or thesis) actually is.

So, what is a dissertation?

At its simplest, a dissertation or thesis is a formal piece of research , reflecting the standard research process . But what is the standard research process, you ask? The research process involves 4 key steps:

• Ask a very specific, well-articulated question (s) (your research topic)
• See what other researchers have said about it (if they’ve already answered it)
• If they haven’t answered it adequately, undertake your own data collection and analysis in a scientifically rigorous fashion
• Answer your original question(s), based on your analysis findings

In short, the research process is simply about asking and answering questions in a systematic fashion . This probably sounds pretty obvious, but people often think they’ve done “research”, when in fact what they have done is:

• Started with a vague, poorly articulated question
• Not taken the time to see what research has already been done regarding the question
• Collected data and opinions that support their gut and undertaken a flimsy analysis
• Drawn a shaky conclusion, based on that analysis

If you want to see the perfect example of this in action, look out for the next Facebook post where someone claims they’ve done “research”… All too often, people consider reading a few blog posts to constitute research. Its no surprise then that what they end up with is an opinion piece, not research. Okay, okay – I’ll climb off my soapbox now.

The key takeaway here is that a dissertation (or thesis) is a formal piece of research, reflecting the research process. It’s not an opinion piece , nor a place to push your agenda or try to convince someone of your position. Writing a good dissertation involves asking a question and taking a systematic, rigorous approach to answering it.

If you understand this and are comfortable leaving your opinions or preconceived ideas at the door, you’re already off to a good start!

Step 2: Find a unique, valuable research topic

As we saw, the first step of the research process is to ask a specific, well-articulated question. In other words, you need to find a research topic that asks a specific question or set of questions (these are called research questions ). Sounds easy enough, right? All you’ve got to do is identify a question or two and you’ve got a winning research topic. Well, not quite…

A good dissertation or thesis topic has a few important attributes. Specifically, a solid research topic should be:

Let’s take a closer look at these:

Attribute #1: Clear

Your research topic needs to be crystal clear about what you’re planning to research, what you want to know, and within what context. There shouldn’t be any ambiguity or vagueness about what you’ll research.

Here’s an example of a clearly articulated research topic:

An analysis of consumer-based factors influencing organisational trust in British low-cost online equity brokerage firms.

As you can see in the example, its crystal clear what will be analysed (factors impacting organisational trust), amongst who (consumers) and in what context (British low-cost equity brokerage firms, based online).

Need a helping hand?

Attribute #2:   Unique

Your research should be asking a question(s) that hasn’t been asked before, or that hasn’t been asked in a specific context (for example, in a specific country or industry).

For example, sticking organisational trust topic above, it’s quite likely that organisational trust factors in the UK have been investigated before, but the context (online low-cost equity brokerages) could make this research unique. Therefore, the context makes this research original.

One caveat when using context as the basis for originality – you need to have a good reason to suspect that your findings in this context might be different from the existing research – otherwise, there’s no reason to warrant researching it.

Attribute #3: Important

Simply asking a unique or original question is not enough – the question needs to create value. In other words, successfully answering your research questions should provide some value to the field of research or the industry. You can’t research something just to satisfy your curiosity. It needs to make some form of contribution either to research or industry.

For example, researching the factors influencing consumer trust would create value by enabling businesses to tailor their operations and marketing to leverage factors that promote trust. In other words, it would have a clear benefit to industry.

So, how do you go about finding a unique and valuable research topic? We explain that in detail in this video post – How To Find A Research Topic . Yeah, we’ve got you covered 😊

Step 3: Write a convincing research proposal

Once you’ve pinned down a high-quality research topic, the next step is to convince your university to let you research it. No matter how awesome you think your topic is, it still needs to get the rubber stamp before you can move forward with your research. The research proposal is the tool you’ll use for this job.

So, what’s in a research proposal?

The main “job” of a research proposal is to convince your university, advisor or committee that your research topic is worthy of approval. But convince them of what? Well, this varies from university to university, but generally, they want to see that:

• You have a clearly articulated, unique and important topic (this might sound familiar…)
• You’ve done some initial reading of the existing literature relevant to your topic (i.e. a literature review)
• You have a provisional plan in terms of how you will collect data and analyse it (i.e. a methodology)

At the proposal stage, it’s (generally) not expected that you’ve extensively reviewed the existing literature , but you will need to show that you’ve done enough reading to identify a clear gap for original (unique) research. Similarly, they generally don’t expect that you have a rock-solid research methodology mapped out, but you should have an idea of whether you’ll be undertaking qualitative or quantitative analysis , and how you’ll collect your data (we’ll discuss this in more detail later).

Long story short – don’t stress about having every detail of your research meticulously thought out at the proposal stage – this will develop as you progress through your research. However, you do need to show that you’ve “done your homework” and that your research is worthy of approval .

So, how do you go about crafting a high-quality, convincing proposal? We cover that in detail in this video post – How To Write A Top-Class Research Proposal . We’ve also got a video walkthrough of two proposal examples here .

Step 4: Craft a strong introduction chapter

Once your proposal’s been approved, its time to get writing your actual dissertation or thesis! The good news is that if you put the time into crafting a high-quality proposal, you’ve already got a head start on your first three chapters – introduction, literature review and methodology – as you can use your proposal as the basis for these.

Handy sidenote – our free dissertation & thesis template is a great way to speed up your dissertation writing journey.

What’s the introduction chapter all about?

The purpose of the introduction chapter is to set the scene for your research (dare I say, to introduce it…) so that the reader understands what you’ll be researching and why it’s important. In other words, it covers the same ground as the research proposal in that it justifies your research topic.

What goes into the introduction chapter?

This can vary slightly between universities and degrees, but generally, the introduction chapter will include the following:

• A brief background to the study, explaining the overall area of research
• A problem statement , explaining what the problem is with the current state of research (in other words, where the knowledge gap exists)
• Your research questions – in other words, the specific questions your study will seek to answer (based on the knowledge gap)
• The significance of your study – in other words, why it’s important and how its findings will be useful in the world

As you can see, this all about explaining the “what” and the “why” of your research (as opposed to the “how”). So, your introduction chapter is basically the salesman of your study, “selling” your research to the first-time reader and (hopefully) getting them interested to read more.

Step 5: Undertake an in-depth literature review

As I mentioned earlier, you’ll need to do some initial review of the literature in Steps 2 and 3 to find your research gap and craft a convincing research proposal – but that’s just scratching the surface. Once you reach the literature review stage of your dissertation or thesis, you need to dig a lot deeper into the existing research and write up a comprehensive literature review chapter.

What’s the literature review all about?

There are two main stages in the literature review process:

Literature Review Step 1: Reading up

The first stage is for you to deep dive into the existing literature (journal articles, textbook chapters, industry reports, etc) to gain an in-depth understanding of the current state of research regarding your topic. While you don’t need to read every single article, you do need to ensure that you cover all literature that is related to your core research questions, and create a comprehensive catalogue of that literature , which you’ll use in the next step.

Reading and digesting all the relevant literature is a time consuming and intellectually demanding process. Many students underestimate just how much work goes into this step, so make sure that you allocate a good amount of time for this when planning out your research. Thankfully, there are ways to fast track the process – be sure to check out this article covering how to read journal articles quickly .

Literature Review Step 2: Writing up

Once you’ve worked through the literature and digested it all, you’ll need to write up your literature review chapter. Many students make the mistake of thinking that the literature review chapter is simply a summary of what other researchers have said. While this is partly true, a literature review is much more than just a summary. To pull off a good literature review chapter, you’ll need to achieve at least 3 things:

• You need to synthesise the existing research , not just summarise it. In other words, you need to show how different pieces of theory fit together, what’s agreed on by researchers, what’s not.
• You need to highlight a research gap that your research is going to fill. In other words, you’ve got to outline the problem so that your research topic can provide a solution.
• You need to use the existing research to inform your methodology and approach to your own research design. For example, you might use questions or Likert scales from previous studies in your your own survey design .

As you can see, a good literature review is more than just a summary of the published research. It’s the foundation on which your own research is built, so it deserves a lot of love and attention. Take the time to craft a comprehensive literature review with a suitable structure .

But, how do I actually write the literature review chapter, you ask? We cover that in detail in this video post .

Step 6: Carry out your own research

Once you’ve completed your literature review and have a sound understanding of the existing research, its time to develop your own research (finally!). You’ll design this research specifically so that you can find the answers to your unique research question.

There are two steps here – designing your research strategy and executing on it:

1 – Design your research strategy

The first step is to design your research strategy and craft a methodology chapter . I won’t get into the technicalities of the methodology chapter here, but in simple terms, this chapter is about explaining the “how” of your research. If you recall, the introduction and literature review chapters discussed the “what” and the “why”, so it makes sense that the next point to cover is the “how” –that’s what the methodology chapter is all about.

In this section, you’ll need to make firm decisions about your research design. This includes things like:

• Your research philosophy (e.g. positivism or interpretivism )
• Your overall methodology (e.g. qualitative , quantitative or mixed methods)
• Your data collection strategy (e.g. interviews , focus groups, surveys)
• Your data analysis strategy (e.g. content analysis , correlation analysis, regression)

If these words have got your head spinning, don’t worry! We’ll explain these in plain language in other posts. It’s not essential that you understand the intricacies of research design (yet!). The key takeaway here is that you’ll need to make decisions about how you’ll design your own research, and you’ll need to describe (and justify) your decisions in your methodology chapter.

2 – Execute: Collect and analyse your data

Once you’ve worked out your research design, you’ll put it into action and start collecting your data. This might mean undertaking interviews, hosting an online survey or any other data collection method. Data collection can take quite a bit of time (especially if you host in-person interviews), so be sure to factor sufficient time into your project plan for this. Oftentimes, things don’t go 100% to plan (for example, you don’t get as many survey responses as you hoped for), so bake a little extra time into your budget here.

Once you’ve collected your data, you’ll need to do some data preparation before you can sink your teeth into the analysis. For example:

• If you carry out interviews or focus groups, you’ll need to transcribe your audio data to text (i.e. a Word document).
• If you collect quantitative survey data, you’ll need to clean up your data and get it into the right format for whichever analysis software you use (for example, SPSS, R or STATA).

Once you’ve completed your data prep, you’ll undertake your analysis, using the techniques that you described in your methodology. Depending on what you find in your analysis, you might also do some additional forms of analysis that you hadn’t planned for. For example, you might see something in the data that raises new questions or that requires clarification with further analysis.

The type(s) of analysis that you’ll use depend entirely on the nature of your research and your research questions. For example:

• If your research if exploratory in nature, you’ll often use qualitative analysis techniques .
• If your research is confirmatory in nature, you’ll often use quantitative analysis techniques
• If your research involves a mix of both, you might use a mixed methods approach

Again, if these words have got your head spinning, don’t worry! We’ll explain these concepts and techniques in other posts. The key takeaway is simply that there’s no “one size fits all” for research design and methodology – it all depends on your topic, your research questions and your data. So, don’t be surprised if your study colleagues take a completely different approach to yours.

Step 7: Present your findings

Once you’ve completed your analysis, it’s time to present your findings (finally!). In a dissertation or thesis, you’ll typically present your findings in two chapters – the results chapter and the discussion chapter .

What’s the difference between the results chapter and the discussion chapter?

While these two chapters are similar, the results chapter generally just presents the processed data neatly and clearly without interpretation, while the discussion chapter explains the story the data are telling  – in other words, it provides your interpretation of the results.

For example, if you were researching the factors that influence consumer trust, you might have used a quantitative approach to identify the relationship between potential factors (e.g. perceived integrity and competence of the organisation) and consumer trust. In this case:

• Your results chapter would just present the results of the statistical tests. For example, correlation results or differences between groups. In other words, the processed numbers.
• Your discussion chapter would explain what the numbers mean in relation to your research question(s). For example, Factor 1 has a weak relationship with consumer trust, while Factor 2 has a strong relationship.

Depending on the university and degree, these two chapters (results and discussion) are sometimes merged into one , so be sure to check with your institution what their preference is. Regardless of the chapter structure, this section is about presenting the findings of your research in a clear, easy to understand fashion.

Importantly, your discussion here needs to link back to your research questions (which you outlined in the introduction or literature review chapter). In other words, it needs to answer the key questions you asked (or at least attempt to answer them).

For example, if we look at the sample research topic:

In this case, the discussion section would clearly outline which factors seem to have a noteworthy influence on organisational trust. By doing so, they are answering the overarching question and fulfilling the purpose of the research .

Step 8: The Final Step Draw a conclusion and discuss the implications

Last but not least, you’ll need to wrap up your research with the conclusion chapter . In this chapter, you’ll bring your research full circle by highlighting the key findings of your study and explaining what the implications of these findings are.

What exactly are key findings? The key findings are those findings which directly relate to your original research questions and overall research objectives (which you discussed in your introduction chapter). The implications, on the other hand, explain what your findings mean for industry, or for research in your area.

Sticking with the consumer trust topic example, the conclusion might look something like this:

Key findings

This study set out to identify which factors influence consumer-based trust in British low-cost online equity brokerage firms. The results suggest that the following factors have a large impact on consumer trust:

While the following factors have a very limited impact on consumer trust:

Notably, within the 25-30 age groups, Factors E had a noticeably larger impact, which may be explained by…

Implications

The findings having noteworthy implications for British low-cost online equity brokers. Specifically:

The large impact of Factors X and Y implies that brokers need to consider….

The limited impact of Factor E implies that brokers need to…

As you can see, the conclusion chapter is basically explaining the “what” (what your study found) and the “so what?” (what the findings mean for the industry or research). This brings the study full circle and closes off the document.

Let’s recap – how to write a dissertation or thesis

You’re still with me? Impressive! I know that this post was a long one, but hopefully you’ve learnt a thing or two about how to write a dissertation or thesis, and are now better equipped to start your own research.

To recap, the 8 steps to writing a quality dissertation (or thesis) are as follows:

• Understand what a dissertation (or thesis) is – a research project that follows the research process.
• Find a unique (original) and important research topic
• Craft a convincing dissertation or thesis research proposal
• Write a clear, compelling introduction chapter
• Undertake a thorough review of the existing research and write up a literature review
• Undertake your own research
• Present and interpret your findings

Once you’ve wrapped up the core chapters, all that’s typically left is the abstract , reference list and appendices. As always, be sure to check with your university if they have any additional requirements in terms of structure or content.

You Might Also Like:

How To Review & Understand Academic Literature Quickly

Learn how to fast-track your literature review by reading with intention and clarity. Dr E and Amy Murdock explain how.

Dissertation Writing Services: Far Worse Than You Think

Thinking about using a dissertation or thesis writing service? You might want to reconsider that move. Here’s what you need to know.

Triangulation: The Ultimate Credibility Enhancer

Triangulation is one of the best ways to enhance the credibility of your research. Learn about the different options here.

The Harsh Truths Of Academic Research

Dr. Ethar Al-Saraf and Dr. Amy Murdock dive into the darker truths of academic research, so that you’re well prepared for reality.

Dissertation Paralysis: How To Get Unstuck

In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Ethar and Dr. Amy Murdock dive into how to get unstuck when you’re facing dissertation paralysis

📄 FREE TEMPLATES

Research Topic Ideation

Proposal Writing

Literature Review

Methodology & Analysis

Academic Writing

Referencing & Citing

Apps, Tools & Tricks

The Grad Coach Podcast

20 Comments

thankfull >>>this is very useful

Thank you, it was really helpful

unquestionably, this amazing simplified way of teaching. Really , I couldn’t find in the literature words that fully explicit my great thanks to you. However, I could only say thanks a-lot.

Great to hear that – thanks for the feedback. Good luck writing your dissertation/thesis.

This is the most comprehensive explanation of how to write a dissertation. Many thanks for sharing it free of charge.

Very rich presentation. Thank you

Thanks Derek Jansen|GRADCOACH, I find it very useful guide to arrange my activities and proceed to research!

Thank you so much for such a marvelous teaching .I am so convinced that am going to write a comprehensive and a distinct masters dissertation

It is an amazing comprehensive explanation

This was straightforward. Thank you!

I can say that your explanations are simple and enlightening – understanding what you have done here is easy for me. Could you write more about the different types of research methods specific to the three methodologies: quan, qual and MM. I look forward to interacting with this website more in the future.

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions 🙂

Hello, your write ups is quite educative. However, l have challenges in going about my research questions which is below; *Building the enablers of organisational growth through effective governance and purposeful leadership.*

Very educating.

Just listening to the name of the dissertation makes the student nervous. As writing a top-quality dissertation is a difficult task as it is a lengthy topic, requires a lot of research and understanding and is usually around 10,000 to 15000 words. Sometimes due to studies, unbalanced workload or lack of research and writing skill students look for dissertation submission from professional writers.

Thank you 💕😊 very much. I was confused but your comprehensive explanation has cleared my doubts of ever presenting a good thesis. Thank you.

thank you so much, that was so useful

Hi. Where is the excel spread sheet ark?

could you please help me look at your thesis paper to enable me to do the portion that has to do with the specification

my topic is “the impact of domestic revenue mobilization.

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Submit Comment

• Print Friendly

About Us arrow_drop_down expand_more

• News Releases

Our Values arrow_drop_down expand_more

• Diversity & Inclusion
• Accessibility
• Slavery Act Statement

Product Families arrow_drop_down expand_more

Content Solutions expand_more

• Books and Ebooks
• Dissertations
• News & Newspapers
• Primary Sources
• Streaming Video

Products by Subject expand_more

• Health & Medicine
• History & Social Change
• Interdisciplinary
• Science & Technology
• Social Sciences

Popular Products expand_more

• ProQuest One Academic
• ProQuest One Business
• ProQuest One Education
• ProQuest One Psychology
• ProQuest Black Studies
• Ebooks Offers for Libraries

Library Management expand_more

Discovery services expand_more, resource sharing expand_more, course resource lists expand_more, research management expand_more, mobile solutions expand_more.

• Innovative Mobile

Libraries We Serve expand_more

• Academic Solutions for universities, colleges, and community colleges of all sizes.
• Public Solutions for librarians supporting patrons of public libraries.
• K-12 Solutions for elementary schools, primary schools and high schools.
• Community College Solutions for community colleges, trade schools and two year programs.
• Government Solutions for governmental affairs offices, patent examiners, and grants administrators.
• Corporate Solutions for professionals in the pharmaceutical, legal industries and more.

Solutions For expand_more

• DEI E-Resources
• Print to Electronic
• Reclaiming Your Space
• Library Management
• Library Management – Public Libraries
• Community Engagement
• Content Discovery
• Research Repository
• Digital Preservation
• Resource Sharing
• Document Delivery
• Course Resources

Account Support expand_more

• Setup and Support
• Access Questions
• Renewing a Product
• Paying an Invoice
• Get Usage Data: ProQuest
• Get Usage Data: Alexander Street
• Submitting Dissertations
• Idea Exchange
• ProQuest Status Page

Tools & Resources expand_more

• Find a Title List
• Accessibility Documentation
• Open Access

Browse Collections by Subject expand_more

I want to expand_more.

• Start my Research
• Start Text & Data Mining
• Find Research Funding
• Keep up with Research News
• Showcase Research
• See Upcoming Webinars
• Contact Support

I’m Interested In expand_more

• Submitting a Dissertation
• Purchasing a Dissertation
• Assembling Course Materials
• Implementing a Mobile Campus App

Insights expand_more

How text and data mining enables digital literacy in the classroom.

Read about the University of Sydney’s journey to integrate text and data mining (TDM) into its undergraduate courses and incorporate it across disciplines

Meeting Your Needs expand_more

• Graduate Students
• Graduate Administrators

Products & Services expand_more

• ETD Dissemination
• Dissertation & Theses Global
• ETD Dashboard

Resources expand_more

• eLearning Modules
• Expert Advice Articles

Dissertations News expand_more

• Top 25 Most-Accessed Dissertations
• Dissertations Award Winners

Are you a researcher looking for scholarly content? Try searching our platform here...

Language preference

Do you want set this as your default language ?

Connect with ProQuest

Top dissertations, dissertation support.

Thank you for contacting ProQuest! Your submission was successful!

We appreciate you contacting us, and one of our colleagues will respond as soon as possible!

Privacy Policy , Terms and Conditions

Have you ever wondered which dissertations and theses are accessed most by researchers?

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global™ database is the world's most comprehensive curated collection of multi-disciplinary dissertations and theses from thousands of universities around the world.  Each month ProQuest posts the top 25 Most-Accessed Dissertations and Theses across all subjects, based upon total document views. Check out the current list of top titles (where a number is listed more than once, this indicates a tie in usage). View the Archives to see lists from previous months.

Dissertations    Theses

Dissertations - August 2024

One with the cloud: why people mistake the internet's knowledge for their own.

Ward, Adrian Frank, Harvard University, 2013, Ph.D. Subject: Psychology

Gender socialization in the family

Shearer, Cindy L., The Pennsylvania State University, 2007, Ph.D. Subject: Developmental psychology

Information sharing and collaboration in the United States intelligence community: An ethnographic study of the National Counterterrorism Center

Nolan, Bridget Rose, University of Pennsylvania, 2013, Ph.D. Subject: Organizational behavior

Servant leadership: A theoretical model

Patterson, Kathleen Ann, Regent University, 2003, Ph.D. Subject: Management

Teacher-Writer Perceptions on the Essence of Writing: Influences, Identity and Habits of Mind to Sustain a Writing Life

Daniels, Shari Lynn, The University of North Dakota, 2018, Ph.D. Subject: Teacher education

Anatolia in the Gap: Phrygia, Lydia, and Orientalizing Reconsidered

Tanaka, Kurtis T., University of Pennsylvania, 2018, Ph.D. Subject: Archaeology

Nothing Left Unfinished: A Transcendental Phenomenology on the Persistence of Black Women in Distance Education Doctoral Programs

Rogers, Sherrita Yolande, Liberty University, 2018, Ed.D. Subject: Higher education

The Effects of Unemployment on Black Youth in Gauteng, South Africa

Holmes, Corey W., Howard University, 2019, Ph.D. Subject: Social research

Improving decision making in healthcare operations

Dean, Matthew D., University of Connecticut, 2010, Ph.D. Subject: Management

THE TEAROOM TRADE: IMPERSONAL SEX IN PUBLIC PLACES

HUMPHREYS, ROBERT ALLAN LAUD, Washington University in St. Louis, 1968, Ph.D. Subject: Individual & family studies

El rol de Ia colaboracion y el Modelo de Aprendizaje Basado en Proyectos (ABPr) mediante el lente de la Teoria de Actividad (CHAT): un estudio de caso con estudiantes de 9no grado

Delgado Quinones, Isabel C., University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras (Puerto Rico), 2015, Ed.D. Subject: Science education

Teachers' perceptions regarding the use of Google Classroom and Google Docs and their impact on student engagement

Morquin, Demian, Texas A&M University - Kingsville, 2016, Ed.D. Subject: Educational leadership

Social Media Technologies' Influence on Adolescent Social/Emotional Development Via Attachment

Davis, Cynthia A., The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, 2017, Psy.D. Subject: Clinical psychology

Social Media and Self-Evaluation: The Examination of Social Media Use on Identity, Social Comparison, and Self-Esteem in Young Female Adults

Solomon, Michelle, William James College, 2016, Psy.D. Subject: Clinical psychology

Identifying as Husbands, Fathers, and School Leaders: A Phenomenology of Doctoral Persistence Among Limited Residency Students

Patterson, John, Liberty University, 2017, Ed.D. Subject: Educational leadership

Mentor and Candidate Attributes That Promote Doctoral Persistence and Postgraduation Scholarship in Limited Residency and Online Doctoral Programs

Spaulding, Maria T., Regent University, 2019, Ph.D. Subject: Higher education

Leadership influence on student motivation: A case study of prospective military musicians in training

Sciarini, Michael J., Regent University, 2003, Ph.D. Subject: Music education

Ngugi wa Thiong'o's drama and the Kamiriithu popular theater experiment

Ndigirigi, Josphat Gichingiri, University of California, Los Angeles, 1998, Ph.D. Subject: Theater

Dynamic mode decomposition: Theory and applications

Tu, Jonathan H., Princeton University, 2013, Ph.D. Subject: Mechanical engineering

The Impact of e-Books with Word Highlighting Features on Early Literacy Skills of Emergent Readers

Bell, Carla Anne, Regent University, 2018, Ph.D. Subject: Educational technology

Knowledge of sickle cell trait and disease among African-American college students

Harrison, Sayward E., East Carolina University, 2011, Ph.D. Subject: Clinical psychology

"The Classical School, Deterrence Theory, and Zero Tolerance": An analysis of a mandatory zero tolerance sanctioning policy in relation to The Classical School of Criminology and Deterrence Theory

Saeler, Adam, Nova Southeastern University, 2015, Ph.D. Subject: Criminology

Therapists' use of reflection of feeling with trauma survivors

Lapin, Joshua S., Pepperdine University, 2016, Psy.D. Subject: Clinical psychology

A Tale of Two Schools: Principal Practices That Support the Achievement of Low-Income Students in Demographically Diverse Schools

Brown, Goldy, III, The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2012, Ph.D. Subject: Educational administration

The emergence of the dark hero in Scott and Byron: A Darwinian perspective

Jobling, Ian D., State University of New York at Buffalo, 2002, Ph.D. Subject: British & Irish literature

The Developmental Outcomes of Late Preterm Infants

Johnstone, Andrea, Pace University, 2012, Psy.D. Subject: Developmental psychology

Essential leadership competencies for U.S. Air Force wing chaplains

Costin, Dondi E., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2008, Ph.D. Subject: Management

The current state of project risk management practices among risk sensitive project management professionals

Voetsch, Robert James, The George Washington University, 2004, Ph.D. Subject: Management

• Request info
• Majors & Degrees
• Prospective Students
• Current Undergraduate Students
• Current Graduate Students
• Online Students
• Alumni and Friends
• Faculty and Staff

Honors College

The Honors Thesis

Page content.

The Honors thesis is the culmination of your academic journey—a journey that begins with curiosity and ends with discovery.

By completing your thesis project, you are taking a significant step towards becoming an expert in your field. This endeavor is not just a requirement for graduation; it is an opportunity for you to delve deeply into a topic about which you are passionate.

The Honors thesis challenges you to think independently, to push the boundaries of current knowledge, and to overcome obstacles with creativity and perseverance. Whether you choose to do a traditional, creative, or applied design project, your thesis is a testament to your passion, dedication, and potential to make a difference in the world. 

Honors students spend the last two years of their time in the Honors College working on the thesis. Here, you will find submission deadlines and suggested timelines for getting the work done.

Learn more about requirements for the thesis and find resources to help.

Explore award-winning thesis projects created by Honors Scholars.

Find answers to your questions about the thesis process.

Schedule a meeting with the Honors Academic Advisor to get help with all things thesis.

Honors College Honor House 118 College Drive #5162 Hattiesburg, MS 39406

Hattiesburg Campus

Phone 601.266.4533

• Award Recipients
• Search Input Search Submit

Student Contributions ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

Superior research and writing by doctoral candidates in computer science and engineering

• ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

About ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

Presented annually to the author(s) of the best doctoral dissertation(s) in computer science and engineering.  The Doctoral Dissertation Award is accompanied by a prize of $20,000, and the Honorable Mention Award is accompanied by a prize totaling $10,000. Winning dissertations will be published in the ACM Digital Library as part of the ACM Books Series.

Recent Doctoral Dissertation Award News

2023 acm doctoral dissertation award.

Nivedita Arora of Northwestern University is the recipient of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for her dissertation “ Sustainable Interactive Wireless Stickers: From Materials to Devices to Applications ,” which demonstrated wireless and batteryless sensor nodes using novel materials and radio backscatter.

Arora’s research envisions creating sustainable computational materials that operate by harvesting energy from the environment and, at the end of their life cycle, can be responsibly composted or recycled. Her research process involves working at the intersection of materials, methods of fabrication, low-power systems, and HCI . She actively looks to apply her work to application domains such as smart homes, health, climate change, and wildlife monitoring.

Arora’s dissertation makes truly groundbreaking contributions to the fields of Ubiquitous Computing and Human-Computer Interaction. Today’s Internet of Things (IoT) devices are bulky, require battery maintenance, and involve costly installation. In contrast, Arora shows how the computational capabilities of sensing, communication, and display can be diffused into materials and everyday objects. She builds interactive stickers that are inexpensive, and easy to deploy and sustainably operate by harvesting energy from body heat or indoor light. She demonstrates this idea over a series of projects. Her first effort,  SATURN , is a thin, flexible multi-layer material that is a self-sustaining audio sensor. Specifically, it uses the vibration itself to power the ability to capture and encode the vibration sensor. SATURN was extended to ZEUSSS  to use passive RF backscatter for wireless transmission on the vibration signal. She followed this up with the MARS platform that produces an extremely low-power (less than a microwatt) resonance circuit that varies its frequency based on user interaction with interfaces that create inductive or capacitive loads on the circuit. Coupling this circuit with FM passive backscatter and ambient power harvesting allows user interfaces such as touch-sensitive buttons, sliders, and vibration sensors to communicate at a distance. The result of these three projects is a flat user interface in a post-it note form factor that can be deployed in the environment simply by sticking it to a flat surface. The flat user interface and mobile design allows for applications such as light switches or audio volume sliders that can simply be pasted where they are needed without worrying about wiring the infrastructure or maintaining batteries.

The final project, VENUS , adds output in the form of low-power display technologies to provide immediate feedback on the surface of the computational material, opening a wide variety of user-facing interaction scenarios. Her work also showed that it is possible to power these circuits through the transfer of body heat when a user touches the button, which can also be used to protect privacy.

Arora is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science Department, as well as the Allen K. and Johnnie Cordell Breed Jr. Professor of Design at Northwestern University. Her research involves rethinking the computing stack from a sustainability-first approach for its entire life-cycle: manufacturing, operation, and disposal. Arora received a PhD in Computer Science and an MS In Human-Computer Interaction from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Honorable Mentions

Honorable Mentions for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Gabriele Farina of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and William Kuszmaul   of Harvard University.

Farina’s   dissertation, “ Game-Theoretic Decision Making in Imperfect-Information Games ” was recognized for laying modern learning foundations for decision-making in imperfect-information sequential games, resolving long-standing questions, and demonstrating state-of-the-art theoretical and practical performance.

Farina is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department (EECS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, optimization, and game theory. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Kuszmaul’s dissertation, “ Randomized Data Structures: New Perspectives and Hidden Surprises ,” is recognized for contributions to the field of randomized data structures that overturn conventional wisdom and widely believed conjecture.

Kuszmaul’s research focuses on algorithms, data structures, and probability. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is presently doing Post Doctoral work at Harvard University. In August, he will be starting as an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University.

Nivedita Arora of Northwestern University is the recipient of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for her dissertation “ Sustainable Interactive Wireless Stickers: From Materials to Devices to Applications . Honorable Mentions for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Gabriele Farina of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and William Kuszmaul   of Harvard University.

2023 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention

2022 acm doctoral dissertation award.

Aayush Jain is the recipient of the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award  for his dissertation “ Indistinguishability Obfuscation From Well-Studied Assumptions ,” which established the feasibility of mathematically rigorous software obfuscation from well-studied hardness conjectures.

The central goal of software obfuscation is to transform source code to make it unintelligible without altering what it computes. Additional conditions may be added, such as requiring the transformed code to perform similarly, or even indistinguishably, from the original. As a software security mechanism, it is essential that software obfuscation have a firm mathematical foundation.

The mathematical object that Jain’s thesis constructs, indistinguishability obfuscation, is considered a theoretical “master tool” in the context of cryptography—not only in helping achieve long-desired cryptographic goals such as functional encryption, but also in expanding the scope of the field of cryptography itself. For example, indistinguishability obfuscation aids in goals related to software security that were previously entirely in the domain of software engineering.

Jain’s dissertation was awarded the Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2021) and was the subject of an article in Quanta Magazine titled “Scientists Achieve Crown Jewel of Cryptography.”

Jain is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is interested in theoretical and applied cryptography and its connections with related areas of theoretical computer science. Jain received a BTech in Electrical Engineering, and an MTech in Information and Communication Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Honorable Mentions for the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Alane Suhr  whose PhD was earned at Cornell University, and Conrad Watt ,  who earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge.

Suhr’s   dissertation, “ Reasoning and Learning in Interactive Natural Language Systems ,” was recognized for formulating and designing algorithms for continual language learning in collaborative interactions, and designing methods to reason about context-dependent language meaning. Suhr’s dissertation made transformative contributions in several areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Suhr is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Suhr’s research is focused on natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision. Suhr received a BS in Computer Science and Engineering from Ohio State University, as well as a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University.

Watt’s dissertation, “ Mechanising and Evolving the Formal Semantics of WebAssembly: the Web’s New Low-Level Language ,” establishes a mechanized semantics for WebAssembly and defines its concurrency model. The model will underpin current and future web engineering. His dissertation is considered a stand-out example of developing and using fully rigorous mechanized semantics to directly affect and improve the designs of major pieces of our industrial computational infrastructure.

Watt is a Research Fellow (postdoctoral) at the University of Cambridge, where he focuses on mechanized formal verification, concurrency, and the WebAssembly language. He received a MEng in Computer Science from Imperial College London and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge.

Aayush Jain is the recipient of the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation “ Indistinguishability Obfuscation From Well-Studied Assumptions .” Honorable Mentions for the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Alane Suhr whose PhD was earned at Cornell University, and Conrad Watt , who earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge.

Jain's dissertation established the feasibility of mathematically rigorous software obfuscation from well-studied hardness conjectures.The central goal of software obfuscation is to transform source code to make it unintelligible without altering what it computes. Additional conditions may be added, such as requiring the transformed code to perform similarly, or even indistinguishably, from the original. As a software security mechanism, it is essential that software obfuscation have a firm mathematical foundation.

2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention

Suhr’s dissertation, “ Reasoning and Learning in Interactive Natural Language Systems ,” was recognized for formulating and designing algorithms for continual language learning in collaborative interactions, and designing methods to reason about context-dependent language meaning. Suhr’s dissertation made transformative contributions in several areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Watt’s dissertation, “ Mechanising and Evolving the Formal Semantics of WebAssembly: The Web’s New Low-Level Language ,” establishes a mechanized semantics for WebAssembly and defines its concurrency model. The model will underpin current and future web engineering. His dissertation is considered a stand-out example of developing and using fully rigorous mechanized semantics to directly affect and improve the designs of major pieces of our industrial computational infrastructure.

2021 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

Manish Raghavan is the recipient of the 2021 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation " The Societal Impacts of Algorithmic Decision-Making ." Raghavan’s dissertation makes significant contributions to the understanding of algorithmic decision making and its societal implications, including foundational results on issues of algorithmic bias and fairness.

Algorithmic fairness is an area within AI that has generated a great deal of public and media interest. Despite being at a very early stage of his career, Raghavan has been one of the leading figures shaping the direction and focus of this line of research.

Raghavan is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society. His primary interests lie in the application of computational techniques to domains of social concern, including algorithmic fairness and behavioral economics, with a particular focus on the use of algorithmic tools in the hiring pipeline. Raghavan received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Cornell University.

Honorable Mentions for the 2021 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Dimitris Tsipras of Stanford University, Pratul Srinivasan of Google Research and Benjamin Mildenhall of Google Research.

Dimitris Tsipras’ dissertation, “ Learning Through the Lens of Robustness ,” was recognized for foundational contributions to the study of adversarially robust machine learning (ML) and building effective tools for training reliable machine learning models. Tsipras made several pathbreaking contributions to one of the biggest challenges in ML today: making ML truly ready for real-world deployment.

Tsipras is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University. His research is focused on understanding and improving the reliability of machine learning systems when faced with the real world. Tsipras received a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, as well as SM and PhD degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Pratul Srinivasan and Benjamin Mildenhall are awarded Honorable Mentions for their co-invention of the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) representation, associated algorithms and theory, and their successful application to the view synthesis problem. Srinivasan’s dissertation, " Scene Representations for View Synthesis with Deep Learning ," and Mildenhall’s dissertation, “ Neural Scene Representations for View Synthesis ,” addressed a long-standing open problem in computer vision and computer graphics. That problem, called “view synthesis” in vision and “unstructured light field rendering” in graphics, involves taking just a handful of photographs of a scene and predicting new images from any intermediate viewpoint. NeRF has already inspired a remarkable volume of follow-on research, and the associated publications have received some of the fastest rates of citation in computer graphics literature—hundreds in the first year of post-publication.

Srinivasan is a Research Scientist at Google Research, where he focuses on problems at the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. He received a BSE degree in Biomedical Engineering and BA in Computer Science from Duke University and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mildenhall is a Research Scientist at Google Research, where he works on problems in computer vision and graphics. He received a BS degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Stanford University and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

2020 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

Chuchu Fan is the recipient of the 2020 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for her dissertation, “ Formal Methods for Safe Autonomy: Data-Driven Verification, Synthesis, and Applications .” The dissertation makes foundational contributions to verification of embedded and cyber-physical systems, and demonstrates applicability of the developed verification technologies in industrial-scale systems.

Fan’s dissertation also advances the theory for sensitivity analysis and symbolic reachability; develops verification algorithms and software tools (DryVR, Realsyn); and demonstrates applications in industrial-scale autonomous systems.

Key contributions of her dissertation include the first data-driven algorithms for bounded verification of nonlinear hybrid systems using sensitivity analysis. A groundbreaking demonstration of this work on an industrial-scale problem showed that verification can scale. Her sensitivity analysis technique was patented, and a startup based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been formed to commercialize this approach.

Fan also developed the first verification algorithm for “black box” systems with incomplete models combining probably approximately correct (PAC) learning with simulation relations and fixed point analyses. DryVR, a tool that resulted from this work, has been applied to dozens of systems, including advanced driver assist systems, neural network-based controllers, distributed robotics, and medical devices.

Additionally, Fan’s algorithms for synthesizing controllers for nonlinear vehicle model systems have been demonstrated to be broadly applicable. The RealSyn approach presented in the dissertation outperforms existing tools and is paving the way for new real-time motion planning algorithms for autonomous vehicles.

Fan is the Wilson Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she leads the Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab. Her group uses rigorous mathematics including formal methods, machine learning, and control theory for the design, analysis, and verification of safe autonomous systems. Fan received a BA in Automation from Tsinghua University. She earned her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Honorable Mentions for the 2020 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Henry Corrigan-Gibbs and Ralf Jung .

Corrigan-Gibbs’s dissertation, “ Protecting Privacy by Splitting Trust ,” improved user privacy on the internet using techniques that combine theory and practice. Corrigan-Gibbs first develops a new type of probabilistically checkable proof (PCP), and then applies this technique to develop the Prio system, an elegant and scalable system that addresses a real industry need. Prio is being deployed at several large companies, including Mozilla, where it has been shipping in the nightly version of the Firefox browser since late 2019, the largest-ever deployment of PCPs.

Corrigan-Gibbs’s dissertation studies how to robustly compute aggregate statistics about a user population without learning anything else about the users. For example, his dissertation introduces a tool enabling Mozilla to measure how many Firefox users encountered a particular web tracker without learning which users encountered that tracker or why. The thesis develops a new system of probabilistically checkable proofs that lets every browser send a short zero-knowledge proof that its encrypted contribution to the aggregate statistics is well formed. The key innovation is that verifying the proof is extremely fast.

Corrigan-Gibbs is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is also a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. His research focuses on computer security, cryptography, and computer systems. Corrigan-Gibbs received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Ralf Jung’s dissertation, “ Understanding and Evolving the Rust Programming Language ,” established the first formal foundations for safe systems programming in the innovative programming language Rust. In development at Mozilla since 2010, and increasingly popular throughout the industry, Rust addresses a longstanding problem in language design: how to balance safety and control. Like C++, Rust gives programmers low-level control over system resources. Unlike C++, Rust also employs a strong “ownership-based” system to statically ensure safety, so that security vulnerabilities like memory access errors and data races cannot occur. Prior to Jung’s work, however, there had been no rigorous investigation of whether Rust’s safety claims actually hold, and due to the extensive use of “unsafe escape hatches” in Rust libraries, these claims were difficult to assess.

In his dissertation, Jung tackles this challenge by developing semantic foundations for Rust that account directly for the interplay between safe and unsafe code. Building upon these foundations, Jung provides a proof of safety for a significant subset of Rust. Moreover, the proof is formalized within the automated proof assistant Coq and therefore its correctness is guaranteed. In addition, Jung provides a platform for formally verifying powerful type-based optimizations, even in the presence of unsafe code.

Through Jung's leadership and active engagement with the Rust Unsafe Code Guidelines working group, his work has already had profound impact on the design of Rust and laid essential foundations for its future.

Jung is a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and a research affiliate of the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests include programming languages, verification, semantics, and type systems. He conducted his doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, and received his PhD, Master's, and Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science from Saarland University.

Chuchu Fan is the recipient of the 2020 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for her dissertation, “ Formal Methods for Safe Autonomy: Data-Driven Verification, Synthesis, and Applications .” Honorable Mentions go to Henry Corrigan-Gibbs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ralf Jung of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and MIT.

Fan’s dissertation makes foundational contributions to verification of embedded and cyber-physical systems, and demonstrates applicability of the developed verification technologies in industrial-scale systems. Her dissertation also advances the theory for sensitivity analysis and symbolic reachability; develops verification algorithms and software tools (DryVR, Realsyn); and demonstrates applications in industrial-scale autonomous systems.

2020 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention

2019 acm doctoral dissertation award.

Dor Minzer of Tel Aviv University is the recipient of the 2019 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation, “ On Monotonicity Testing and the 2-to-2-Games Conjecture .” Honorable Mentions go to Jakub Tarnawski of École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and JiaJun Wu of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dor Minzer's dissertation, “ On Monotonicity Testing and the 2-to-2-Games Conjecture ,” settles the complexity of testing monotonicity of Boolean functions and makes a significant advance toward resolving the Unique Games Conjecture, one of the most central problems in approximation algorithms and complexity theory.

Property-testers are extremely efficient randomized algorithms that check whether an object satisfies a certain property, when the data is too large to examine. For example, one may want to check that the distance between any two computers in the internet network does not exceed a given bound. In the first part of his thesis, Minzer settled a famous open problem in the field by introducing an optimal tester that checks whether a given Boolean function (voting scheme) is monotonic.

The holy grail of complexity theory is to classify computational problems to those that are feasible and those that are infeasible. The PCP theorem (for probabilistically checkable proofs) establishes the framework that enables classifying approximation problems as infeasible, showing they are NP-hard. In 2002, Subhash Khot proposed the Unique Games Conjecture (UGC), asserting that a very strong version of the PCP theorem should still hold. The conjecture has inspired a flurry of research and has had far-reaching implications. If proven true, the conjecture would explain the complexity of a whole family of algorithmic problems. In contrast to other conjectures, UGC has been controversial, splitting the community into believers and skeptics. While progress toward validating the conjecture has stalled, evidence against it had been piling up, involving new algorithmic techniques.

In the second part of his dissertation, Minzer went halfway toward establishing the conjecture, and in the process nullified the strongest known evidence against UGC. Even if UGC is not resolved in the immediate future, Minzer’s dissertation makes significant advances toward solving research problems that have previously appeared out of reach.

Minzer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, and will be joining MIT as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2020. His main research interests are in computational complexity theory, PCP, and analysis of Boolean functions. Minzer received a BA in Mathematics, as well as an MSc and PhD in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.

Dor Minzer of Tel Aviv University is the recipient of the 2019 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation, “ On Monotonicity Testing and the 2-to-2-Games Conjecture .” The key contributions of Minzer’s dissertation are settling the complexity of testing monotonicity of Boolean functions and making a significant advance toward resolving the Unique Games Conjecture, one of the most central problems in approximation algorithms and complexity theory.

Honorable Mentions for the 2019 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Jakub Tarnawski , École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and JiaJun Wu , Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Jakub Tarnawski’s dissertation “ New Graph Algorithms via Polyhedral Techniques ” made groundbreaking algorithmic progress on two of the most central problems in combinatorial optimization: the matching problem and the traveling salesman problem. Work on deterministic parallel algorithms for the matching problem is motivated by one of the unsolved mysteries in computer science: does randomness help in speeding up algorithms? Tarnawski’s dissertation makes significant progress on this question by almost completely derandomizing a three-decade-old randomized parallel matching algorithm by Ketan Mulmuley, Umesh Vaziriani, and Vijay Vazirani.

The second major result of Tarnawski’s dissertation relates to the traveling salesman problem: find the shortest tour of n given cities. Already in 1956, George Dantzig et al. used a linear program to solve a special instance of the problem. Since then the strength of their linear program has become one of the main open problems in combinatorial optimization. Tarnawski’s dissertation resolves this question asymptotically and gives the first constant-factor approximation algorithm for the asymmetric traveling salesman problem.

Tarnawski is a researcher at Microsoft Research. He is broadly interested in theoretical computer science and combinatorial optimization, particularly in graph algorithms and approximation algorithms. He received his PhD from EPFL and an MSc in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Wrocław, Poland.

JiaJun Wu’s dissertation, “ Learning to See the Physical World ,” has advanced AI for perceiving the physical world by integrating bottom-up recognition in neural networks with top-down simulation engines, graphical models, and probabilistic programs. Despite phenomenal progress in the past decade, current artificial intelligence methods tackle only specific problems, require large amounts of training data, and easily break when generalizing to new tasks or environments. Human intelligence reveals how far we need to go: from a single image, humans can explain what we see, reconstruct the scene in 3D, predict what’s going to happen, and plan our actions accordingly.

Wu addresses the problem of physical scene understanding—how to build efficient and versatile machines that learn to see, reason about, and interact with the physical world. The key insight is to exploit the causal structure of the world, using simulation engines for computer graphics, physics, and language, and to integrate them with deep learning. His dissertation spans perception, physics and reasoning, with the goal of seeing and reasoning about the physical world as humans do. The work bridges the various disciplines of artificial intelligence, addressing key problems in perception, dynamics modeling, and cognitive reasoning.

Wu is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. His research interests include physical scene understanding, dynamics models, and multi-modal perception. He received his PhD and SM degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Economics from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

2019 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention

2018 acm doctoral dissertation award.

Chelsea Finn of the University of California, Berkeley is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for her dissertation, “ Learning to Learn with Gradients .” In her thesis, Finn introduced algorithms for meta-learning that enable deep networks to solve new tasks from small datasets, and demonstrated how her algorithms can be applied in areas including computer vision, reinforcement learning and robotics.

Deep learning has transformed the artificial intelligence field and has led to significant advances in areas including speech recognition, computer vision and robotics. However, deep learning methods require large datasets, which aren’t readily available in areas such as medical imaging and robotics.

Meta-learning is a recent innovation that holds promise to allow machines to learn with smaller datasets. Meta-learning algorithms “learn to learn” by using past data to learn how to adapt quickly to new tasks. However, much of the initial work in meta-learning focused on designing increasingly complex neural network architectures. In her dissertation, Finn introduced a class of methods called model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) methods, which don’t require computer scientists to manually design complex architectures. Finn’s MAML methods have had tremendous impact on the field and have been widely adopted in reinforcement learning, computer vision and other fields of machine learning.

At a young age, Finn has become one of the most recognized experts in the field of robotic learning. She has developed some of the most effective methods to teach robots skills to control and manipulate objects. In one instance highlighted in her dissertation, she used her MAML methods to teach a robot reaching and placing skills, using raw camera pixels from just a single human demonstration.

Finn is a Research Scientist at Google Brain and a postdoctoral researcher at the Berkeley AI Research Lab (BAIR). In the fall of 2019, she will start a full-time appointment as an Assistant Professor at Stanford University. Finn received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley and a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Honorable Mentions for the 2018 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Ryan Beckett and Tengyu Ma , who both received PhD degrees in Computer Science from Princeton University.

Ryan Beckett developed new, general and efficient algorithms for creating and validating network control plane configurations in his dissertation, “ Network Control Plane Synthesis and Verification .” Computer networks connect key components of the world’s critical infrastructure. When such networks are misconfigured, several systems people rely on are interrupted—airplanes are grounded, banks go offline, etc. Beckett’s dissertation describes new principles, algorithms and tools for substantially improving the reliability of modern networks. In the first half of his thesis, Beckett shows that it is unnecessary to simulate the distributed algorithms that traditional routers implement—a process that is simply too costly—and that instead, one can directly verify the stable states to which such algorithms will eventually converge. In the second half of his thesis, he shows how to generate correct configurations from surprisingly compact high-level specifications.

Beckett is a researcher in the mobility and networking group at Microsoft Research. He received his PhD and MA in Computer Science from Princeton University, and both a BS in Computer Science and a BA in Mathematics from the University of Virginia.

Tengyu Ma’s dissertation, " Non-convex Optimization for Machine Learning: Design, Analysis, and Understanding ,” develops novel theory to support new trends in machine learning. He introduces significant advances in proving convergence of nonconvex optimization algorithms in machine learning, and outlines properties of machine learning models trained via such methods. In the first part of his thesis, Ma studies a range of problems, such as matrix completion, sparse coding, simplified neural networks, and learning linear dynamical systems, and formalizes clear and natural conditions under which one can design provable correct and efficient optimization algorithms. In the second part of his thesis, Ma shows how to understand and interpret the properties of embedding models for natural languages, which were learned using nonconvex optimization.

Ma is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at Stanford University. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University and a BS in Computer Science from Tsinghua University.

2018 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention

Chelsea Finn of the University of California, Berkeley is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for her dissertation, “ Learning to Learn with Gradients .” Honorable Mentions go to Ryan Beckett and Tengyu Ma , who both received PhD degrees in Computer Science from Princeton University.

Beckett developed new, general and efficient algorithms for creating and validating network control plane configurations in his dissertation, “ Network Control Plane Synthesis and Verification .” Computer networks connect key components of the world’s critical infrastructure. When such networks are misconfigured, several systems people rely on are interrupted—airplanes are grounded, banks go offline, etc. Beckett’s dissertation describes new principles, algorithms and tools for substantially improving the reliability of modern networks. In the first half of his thesis, Beckett shows that it is unnecessary to simulate the distributed algorithms that traditional routers implement—a process that is simply too costly—and that instead, one can directly verify the stable states to which such algorithms will eventually converge. In the second half of his thesis, he shows how to generate correct configurations from surprisingly compact high-level specifications.

Ma’s dissertation, " Non-convex Optimization for Machine Learning: Design, Analysis, and Understanding ,” develops novel theory to support new trends in machine learning. He introduces significant advances in proving convergence of nonconvex optimization algorithms in machine learning, and outlines properties of machine learning models trained via such methods. In the first part of his thesis, Ma studies a range of problems, such as matrix completion, sparse coding, simplified neural networks, and learning linear dynamical systems, and formalizes clear and natural conditions under which one can design provable correct and efficient optimization algorithms. In the second part of his thesis, Ma shows how to understand and interpret the properties of embedding models for natural languages, which were learned using nonconvex optimization.

2017 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

Aviad Rubinstein is the recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2017 Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation “ Hardness of Approximation Between P and NP .” In his thesis, Rubinstein established the intractability of the approximate Nash equilibrium problem and several other important problems between P and NP-completeness—an enduring problem in theoretical computer science.

For several decades, researchers in areas including economics and game theory have developed mathematical equilibria models to predict how people in a game or economic environment might act given certain conditions.

When applying computational approaches to equilibria models, important questions arise, including how long it would take a computer to calculate an equilibrium. In theoretical computer science, a problem that can be solved in theory (given finite resources, such as time) but for which, in practice, any solution takes too many resources (that is, too much time) to be useful is known as an intractable problem. In 2008, Daskalakis, Goldberg and Papadimitriou demonstrated the intractability of the Nash equilibrium, an often-examined scenario in game theory and economics where no player in the game would take a different action as long as every other player in the game remains the same. But a very large question remained in theoretical computer science as to whether an approximate Nash equilibrium (a variation of the Nash equilibrium that allows the possibility that a player may have a small incentive to do something different) is also intractable.

Rubinstein’s dissertation introduced brilliant new ideas and novel mathematical techniques to demonstrate that the approximate Nash equilibrium is also intractable. Beyond solving this important question, Rubinstein’s thesis also insightfully addressed other problems around P and NP completeness, the most important question in theoretical computer science. Rubinstein is a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University and will be starting an appointment as an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in the fall of 2018. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, an MSc in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University (Israel) and a BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Technion (Israel).

Honorable Mentions for the 2017 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award went to Mohsen Ghaffari , who received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (MIT EECS) and Stefanie Mueller , who received her PhD from the Hasso Plattner Institute (Germany). 

In Ghaffari’s dissertation, “ Improved Distributed Algorithms for Fundamental Graph Problems ,” he presents novel distributed algorithms that significantly lower the costs of solving fundamental graph problems in networks, including structuring problems, connectivity problems, and scheduling problems. Ghaffari’s dissertation includes both breakthrough algorithmic contributions and interesting methodology. The first part of the dissertation presents a new maximal independent set (MIS) algorithm, which is a breakthrough because it achieves a better time bound than previous algorithms for this three-decades-old problem. The second part of the dissertation contains a collection of related results about vertex connectivity decompositions. Finally, in the third part of his dissertation, Ghaffari introduces a time-efficient algorithm for concurrent scheduling of multiple distributed algorithms. Ghaffari is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He received a PhD and SM in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received a double major in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Sharif University (Iran).

Mueller’s dissertation, “ Interacting with Personal Fabrication Devices ,” demonstrates how to make personal fabrication machines interactive. Her approach involves two steps: speeding of batch processing and turn taking, and real-time interaction.  Her software systems faBrickator, WirePrint and Platener allow users to fabricate 10 times faster, a process she calls low-fidelity fabrication or low-fab. In her dissertation she also outlines how to add interactivity. Constructable, a tool she developed, allows workers to fabricate by sketching directly on the workpiece, causing a laser cutter to implement these sketches when the user stops drawing. Another of Mueller’s tools, LaserOrigami, extends this work to 3D.  Mueller is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at MIT EECS and MIT CSAIL. She received a PhD in Computer Science as well as an MSc in IT-Systems Engineering from the Hasso Plattner Institute (Germany). Earlier, she received a BSc in Computer Science and Media from the University of Applied Science Harz (Germany).

Honorable Mentions for the 2017 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award went to Mohsen Ghaffari , who received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (MIT EECS) and Stefanie Mueller , who received her PhD from the Hasso Plattner Institute (Germany).

2017 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention

Aviad Rubinstein is the recipient of the  Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2017 Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation “ Hardness of Approximation Between P and NP .” Honorable Mentions for the award went to Mohsen Ghaffari , who received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (MIT EECS) and Stefanie Mueller , who received her PhD from the Hasso Plattner Institute (Germany).

2017 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Award Honorable Mention

Aviad Rubinstein is the recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2017 Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation “ Hardness of Approximation Between P and NP .” Honorable Mentions for the award went to Mohsen Ghaffari , who received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (MIT EECS) and Stefanie Mueller , who received her PhD from the Hasso Plattner Institute (Germany).

2016 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

Haitham Hassanieh is the recipient of the ACM 2016 Doctoral Dissertation Award . Hassanieh developed highly efficient algorithms for computing the Sparse Fourier Transform, and demonstrated their applicability in many domains including networks, graphics, medical imaging and biochemistry.  In his dissertation,  The Sparse Fourier Transform: Theory and Practice , he presented a new way to decrease the amount of computation needed to process data, thus increasing the efficiency of programs in several areas of computing.

In computer science, the Fourier transform is a fundamental tool for processing streams of data. It identifies frequency patterns in the data, a task that has a broad array of applications. For many years, the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) was considered the most efficient algorithm in this area. With the growth of Big Data, however, the FFT cannot keep up with the massive increase in datasets. In his doctoral dissertation Hassanieh presents the theoretical foundation of the Sparse Fourier Transform (SFT), an algorithm that is more efficient than FFT for data with a limited number of frequencies. He then shows how this new algorithm can be used to build practical systems to solve key problems in six different applications including wireless networks, mobile systems, computer graphics, medical imaging, biochemistry and digital circuits. Hassanieh’s Sparse Fourier Transform can process data at a rate that is 10 to 100 times faster than was possible before, thus greatly increasing the power of networks and devices.

Hassanieh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A native of Lebanon, he earned a BE in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut. Hassanieh’s Sparse Fourier Transform algorithm was chosen by  MIT Technology Review as one of the top 10 breakthrough technologies of 2012. He has also been recognized with the Sprowls Award for Best Dissertation in Computer Science, and the SIGCOMM Best Paper Award.

Honorable Mention for the 2016 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award went to Peter Bailis of Stanford University and Veselin Raychev of ETH Zurich.

In Bailis’s dissertation, Coordination Avoidance in Distributed Databases , he addresses a perennial problem in a network of multiple computers working together to achieve a common goal: Is it possible to build systems that scale efficiently (process ever-increasing amounts of data) while ensuring that application data remains provably correct and consistent? These concerns are especially timely as Internet services such as Google and Facebook have led to a vast increase in the global distribution of data. In addressing this problem, Bailis introduces a new framework, invariant confluence, that mitigates the fundamental tradeoffs between coordination and consistency. His dissertation breaks new conceptual ground in the areas of transaction processing and distributed consistency—two areas thought to be fully understood. Bailis is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley and his AB in Computer Science from Harvard College.

Raychev’s dissertation, Learning from Large Codebases , introduces new methods for creating programming tools based on probabilistic models of code that can solve tasks beyond the reach of current methods. As the size of publicly available codebases has grown dramatically in recent years, so has interest in developing programming tools that solve software tasks by learning from these codebases. Raychev’s dissertation takes a novel approach to addressing this challenge that combines advanced techniques in programming languages with machine learning practices. In the thesis, Raychev lays out four separate methods that detail how machine learning approaches can be applied to program analysis in order to produce useful programming tools. These include: code completion with statistical language models; predicting program properties from big code; learning program from noisy data; and learning statistical code completion systems. Raychev’s work is regarded as having the potential to open up several promising new avenues of research in the years to come. Raychev is currently a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of DeepCode, a company developing artificial intelligence-based programming tools. He received a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich. A native of Bulgaria, he received MS and BS degrees from Sofia University.

2016 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention Award

Haitham Hassanieh is the recipient of the ACM 2016 Doctoral Dissertation Award .  Honorable Mention for the 2016 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award went to Peter Bailis of Stanford University and Veselin Raychev of ETH Zurich.

Haitham Hassanieh  is the recipient of the ACM 2016  Doctoral Dissertation Award . Hassanieh developed highly efficient algorithms for computing the Sparse Fourier Transform, and demonstrated their applicability in many domains including networks, graphics, medical imaging and biochemistry.  In his dissertation,  The Sparse Fourier Transform: Theory and Practice , he presented a new way to decrease the amount of computation needed to process data, thus increasing the efficiency of programs in several areas of computing.

Hassanieh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A native of Lebanon, he earned a BE in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut. Hassanieh’s Sparse Fourier Transform algorithm was chosen by  MIT Technology Review  as one of the top 10 breakthrough technologies of 2012. He has also been recognized with the Sprowls Award for Best Dissertation in Computer Science, and the SIGCOMM Best Paper Award.

Honorable Mention for the 2016 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award went to  Peter Bailis  of Stanford University and  Veselin Raychev  of ETH Zurich.

In Bailis’s dissertation,  Coordination Avoidance in Distributed Databases , he addresses a perennial problem in a network of multiple computers working together to achieve a common goal: Is it possible to build systems that scale efficiently (process ever-increasing amounts of data) while ensuring that application data remains provably correct and consistent? These concerns are especially timely as Internet services such as Google and Facebook have led to a vast increase in the global distribution of data. In addressing this problem, Bailis introduces a new framework, invariant confluence, that mitigates the fundamental tradeoffs between coordination and consistency. His dissertation breaks new conceptual ground in the areas of transaction processing and distributed consistency—two areas thought to be fully understood. Bailis is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley and his AB in Computer Science from Harvard College.

Carnegie Mellon Graduate Earns ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

Julian Shun has won the 2015 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award presented by ACM for providing evidence that, with appropriate programming techniques, frameworks and algorithms, shared-memory programs can be simple, fast and scalable. In his dissertation Shared-Memory Parallelism Can Be Simple, Fast, and Scalable , he proposes new techniques for writing scalable parallel programs that run efficiently both in theory and in practice.

While parallelism is essential to achieving high performance in computing, writing efficient and scalable programs can be very difficult. Shun’s three-pronged approach to writing parallel programs that he outlines in his thesis includes:

• proposing tools and techniques for deterministic parallel programming;
• the introduction of Ligra, the first high-level shared-memory framework for parallel graph traversal algorithms; and
• presenting new algorithms for a variety of important problems on graphs and strings that are both efficient in theory and practice.

Shun is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was awarded a Miller Research Fellowship. He earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University, which nominated him for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. He earned a B.A. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was ranked first in the 2008 graduating class of computer science students. During the 2013-2014 academic year, he was the recipient of a Facebook Graduate Fellowship.

He will receive the Doctoral Dissertation Award and its $20,000 prize at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 11 in San Francisco. Financial sponsorship of the award is provided by Google Inc.

Honorable Mention

Honorable mention for the 2015 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award went to Aaron Sidford of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Siavash Mirarab of the University of Texas at Austin. They will share a $10,000 prize, with financial sponsorship provided by Google Inc.

In Sidford’s dissertation, Iterative Methods, Combinatorial Optimization, and Linear Programming Beyond the Universal Barrier , he considers the fundamental problems in continuous and combinatorial optimization that occur pervasively in practice, and shows how to improve upon the best-known theoretical running times for solving these problems across a broad range of parameters. Sidford uses and improves techniques from diverse disciplines including spectral graph theory, numerical analysis, data structures, and convex optimization to provide the first theoretical improvements in decades for multiple classic problems ranging from linear programming to linear system solving to maximum flow. Sidford is presently a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft New England. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which nominated him for this award.

Mirarab’s dissertation, Novel Scalable Approaches for Multiple Sequence Alignment and Phylogenomic Reconstruction , addresses the growing need to analyze large-scale biological sequence data efficiently and accurately. To address this challenge, Mirarab introduces several methods: PASTA, a scalable and accurate algorithm that can align data sets up to one million sequences; statistical binning, a novel technique for reducing noise in estimation of evolutionary trees for individual parts of the genome; and ASTRAL, a new summary method that can run on 1,000 species in one day and has outstanding accuracy. These methods were essential in analyzing very large genomic datasets of birds and plants. Mirarab is currently an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, which nominated him for this award.

Creator Of Advanced Data Processing Architecture Wins 2014 Doctoral Dissertation Award

Matei Zaharia  won the 2014 Doctoral Dissertation Award for his innovative solution to tackling the surge in data processing workloads, and accommodating the speed and sophistication of complex multi-stage applications and more interactive ad-hoc queries. His work proposed a new architecture for cluster computing systems, achieving best-in-class performance in a variety of workloads while providing a simple programming model that lets users easily and efficiently combine them.

To address the limited processing capabilities of single machines in an age of growing data volumes and stalling process speeds, Zaharia developed Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs). As described in his dissertation “An Architecture for Fast and General Data Processing on Large Clusters,” RDDs are a distributed memory abstraction that lets programmers perform computations on large clusters in a faulttolerant manner. He implements RDDs in the open source Apache Spark system, which matches or exceeds the performance of specialized systems in many application domains, achieving up to speeds 100 times faster for certain applications. It also offers stronger fault tolerance guarantees and allows these workloads to be combined.

Zaharia, an assistant professor at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), completed his dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, which nominated him. A graduate of the University of Waterloo, where he won a gold medal at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) in 2005, he earned a Bachelor of Mathematics (B. Math) degree. He is a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Databricks, the company that is commercializing Apache Spark.

He will receive the Doctoral Dissertation Award and its $20,000 prize at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 20 in San Francisco, CA. Financial sponsorship of the award is provided by Google Inc.

Honorable Mention for the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award went to  John Criswell  of the University of Rochester, and  John C. Duchi  of Stanford University. They will share a $10,000 prize, with financial sponsorship provided by Google Inc.

Criswell’s dissertation, “Secure Virtual Architecture: Security for Commodity Software Systems,” describes a compiler-based infrastructure designed to address the challenges of securing systems that use commodity operating systems like UNIX or Linux. This Secure Virtual Architecture (SVA) can protect both operating system and application code through compiler instrumentation techniques. He completed a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which nominated him for this award.

Duchi’s dissertation, “Multiple Optimality Guarantees in Statistical Learning,” explores tradeoffs that occur in modern statistical and machine learning applications. The criteria for these tradeoffs – computation, communication, privacy – must be optimized to maintain statistical performance. He explores examples from optimization, and shows some of the practical benefits that a focus on multiple optimality criteria can bring about. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley with an M.A. degree in Statistics and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, he was also an undergraduate and masters student at Stanford University. He was nominated by UC Berkeley for this award.

ACM will present these and other awards at the ACM Awards Banquet on June 20, 2015 in San Francisco, CA.

Press Release

Doctoral Dissertation Award Recognizes Young Researchers

Nivedita Arora  is the recipient of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for demonstrating wireless and batteryless sensor nodes using novel materials and radio backscatter in her dissertation “Sustainable Interactive Wireless Stickers: From Materials to Devices to Applications.” Honorable Mentions for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Gabriele Farina , whose PhD was earned at Carnegie Mellon University, for his dissertation “Game-Theoretic Decision Making in Imperfect-Information Games”; and William Kuszmaul , whose PhD was earned at MIT, for his dissertation “Randomized Data Structures: New Perspectives and Hidden Surprises.”

Full List of ACM Awards

Acm awards by category, career-long contributions, early-to-mid-career contributions, specific types of contributions, student contributions, regional awards, how awards are proposed.

Submitted by WA Contents

Winners announced for architecture thesis of the year 2020, india architecture news - sep 02, 2020 - 16:30   30788 views.

theCharette encourages free flow of unfettered ideas that seek to develop ingenious solutions for complex problems of the future. theCharette has announced the three winning projects for Architecture Thesis of the Year 2020 . 

The "Architecture Thesis of the Year | ATY 2020" is an international architecture thesis competition organized by theCharette. The aim of the competition is to extend appreciation to the tireless effort and exceptional creativity of student thesis in the fields of Architecture, Urban Design, Landscape and Restoration. 

theCharette seeks to encourage young talent in bringing their path breaking ideas to the forefront on a global scale. The competition received over 1000 entries from 104 nations across the world. See the crème de la crème of thesis projects from students all over the world for the 2020 edition of the competition.

The full results, including the winners, the honourable mentions, and the top 30 shortlisted entries can be viewed at theCharette's website . 

The jury panel composed of Marcia Kogan (Studio MK27, Brazil), Bruno Rollet (Bruno Rollet Architecte, Paris), Daniela Deutsch (Associate Prof., NewSchool of Architecture & Design, California), DR. Caroline Hachem-Vermette (Assistant Prof, University of Calgary, Canada) and Stefan Kristofferson (Stratic, Germany, Sweden & India).

See top three winners and read short project descriptions below:

Images courtesy of the artists

1st Prize Winner

ISTHME // L e CHAOS SENSIBLE by Dafni Filippa and Meriam Sehimi from Germany took home the top prize with their people oriented project. The students from the Technical University of Munich designed a scheme that the jury described as "poetic, based on real-life observations, lightweight and extraordinarily beautiful."

Jurors loved the simplicity and fluidity of the masterplan and how another culture is interpreted. They felt that drawings are adequate, sensitive and stunning.

Images courtesy of the artist

2nd Prize Winner

Fabiola del Carmen Cruz Ballardo, from Peru, won second place for her project, AMAZONIA TRANS _ TRI _ FRONTERIZA. Three countries: Peru, Brazil, Bolivia; and two communities: Mancheron, Yamaha. All separated by artificial borders. Nevertheless, they share a common Amazonian culture. 

There is a will to unite people in this project, to respect different traditions, to propose different places, uniting past present and future with traditional languages, medical plants and culture. A "bridge" is created to consolidate this place and to respect it through the world: it can be seen like an SOS. Because this project is also implicitly about the amazon forest: calling to save its richness, be it natural or cultural.

3rd Prize Winner

Third place in the competition went to Philip Springall from United Kingdom. His project is a multidisciplinary exploration of Alzheimer’s disease, architecture and neuroscience. Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease that slowly strips away the notions of place, memory, identity and the self. 

The project investigates the role that architecture and the built environment can play in improving the lives of those with Alzheimer’s disease. The jury felt that the project "...contemplates a powerful concept which might have great applications in the real world."

The ATY Competition is an annual competition and will be released again in Summer of 2021.

Top image: 2nd Prize Winner Fabiola del Carmen Cruz Ballardo

> via theCharette

Other readers also found these interesting...

• [email protected]
• CURRENT COMPETITION

Archmello - Thesis of the Year Award : 2024

Total prize - inr 60000, registration dates.

01/07/2024 to 25/08/2024

Thesis , the only studio in architecture wherein the student gets a chance to select the studio program of his/her choice. It provides an opportunity to the students to explore a particular design category, address any social - cultural - political issue through architecture or work on the futuristic theme for the betterment of the society. Architectural Thesis is a stage of going beyond & exploring new dimensions of designs. We believe six months of rigorous research & design creativity should be acknowledged. THESIS OF THE YEAR AWARD - 2024 is our small attempt to honor some of the best thesis works from around the globe.

Total Prize INR 60000

Manoj Patel

Principal Architect - Manoj Patel Design Studio

• Edition - 1
• Edition - 2
• Edition - 3

First Prize - TA21A0052

Sergio Mutis - Colombia

Second Prize - TA21A0346

Lee Min Hui - Malaysia

Third Prize - TA21A0181

Preksha Chheda - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0191

Hariish Ananthan - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0587

Anandita Ayesha Rangarajan - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0466

Theodora Li - United Kingdom

Honorable Mention - TA21A0231

Harish Kanth - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0441

Akanksha Deolekar - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0410

Jerwin Geo - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0422

Santhosh Narayanan - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0488

Saivi Shah - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0538

Mohamed Farook Ahlam S - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0332

Adnan Kasubhai - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0382

Mokshit Dedhia - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0593

Francesca Prini, Selene Rini, Nicole Vettore - Italy

Honorable Mention - TA21A0459

Riyesh Patil - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0413

Vatsal Shah - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0190

Lilian Silva Costa - Brazil

Honorable Mention - TA21A0182

Abishek Raj - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0158

Ravi Modi - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0149

Anisha Mehta - India

Honorable Mention - TA21A0108

Utkarsh Kumar Verma - India

First Prize - TA23B70923

Second Prize - TA23B70961

Third Prize - TA23B70775

Dean Smuts ( South Africa )

Honorable Mention - TA23B71226

Vinayak Bhattacharya, Tanvee Thapa, Silvia Caremoli

Honorable Mention - TA23B70689

Serah Yatin

Honorable Mention - TA23B71050

Liron Gonsalves

Honorable Mention - TA23B1225

Md. Zahidur Rahman

Honorable Mention - TA23B71236

Ritika Somani

Honorable Mention - TA23B71225

Ayesha Akhter

Honorable Mention - TA23B71206

Alvin Baride

Honorable Mention - TA23B70905

Ngo Thanh Quy

Honorable Mention - TA23B71219

Md. Muhaiminur Rahman

Honorable Mention - TA23B70901

Special Mention - TA23B71240

Snigdha Gopalkrishnan

Special Mention - TA23B70859

Rohit Belvikar

Special Mention - TA23B70912

Special Mention - TA23B71241

Riddhee Madan Patil

Special Mention - TA23B71160

Harsh Agarwal

Special Mention - TA23B71012

Priya Chauhan

Special Mention - TA23B70737

Reeshba Reji

Special Mention - TA23B1533

Special Mention - TA23B70927

Pradyumna Lalit Vikharankar

Special Mention - TA23B41425

Top 10 - TA23B70973

Riya Saira Georgi

Top 10 - TA23B41435

Eromitha Ramesh

Top 10 - TA23B1547

Vini Thakker

Top 10 - TA23B70941

Rachit Joshi

Top 10 - TA23B71129

Garima Mutha

Top 10 - TA23B1531

Urja Laddha

Top 10 - TA23B71044

Top 10 - TA23B1545

Disha Rabadia

Top 10 - TA23B70782

Zalavadiya Nikunj Harshadbhai

Top 10 - TA23B71248

Woon Zi Zheng

First Prize – TA24F0033

Harsh Sheladiya

Second Prize – TA24F0065

Ameya Thanawala

Third Prize – TA24F1311

Nikita Yeola

Honorable Mention – TA24F0021

Ruheen Aijaz Chhapra

Honorable Mention – TA24F1389

Trevin DSouza

Honorable Mention – TA24F1412

Vineeth P.S

Honorable Mention – TA24F0217

Honorable Mention – TA24F0281

Shubhankan Jain

Honorable Mention – TA24F0287

Honorable Mention – TA24F0291

Anushka Nahar

Honorable Mention – TA24F1302

Tridha Singh

Honorable Mention – TA24F1459

• Hispanoamérica
• Work at ArchDaily
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Architecture Competitions

Architectural Thesis Award - ATA2020

• Published on November 06, 2019

Archistart promotes the fourth Architectural Thesis Award , the international thesis award, launched with the aim of promoting, rewarding and giving visibility to young talents in architecture.

The three last editions of the Architectural Thesis Award were a great success among young talents in architecture. There were, in the last one edition – ATA2019, 202 participants from different nationalities with 148 projects.

The ATA2019 winning thesis project was MOSUL POSTWAR CAMP ( https://www.archistart.net/portfolio-item/mosul-postwar-camp/ ) by Edoardo Daniele Stuggiu and Stefano Lombardi. The project excels for the completeness of the methodological approach, with a proposal that analyzes and solves all the design scales. Clearness of the idea and effectiveness of the communication. The analysis on the topic and the response to the social and environmental problem was particularly appropriated.

The award includes a grant of € 2,000 in cash and the chance to participate in Archistart contests and workshops free of charge. Archistart also promotes a social contest on its portal: prizes consist of free participation to IAHsummer2020 (International Architecture Holiday) or free admission to an Archistart competition.

Registration Deadline

Submission deadline.

The contest is open to all recent graduates in architecture and building engineering who have developed a three-years or master’s thesis project in the period from January 2017 to January 2020 in the following areas: architectural design and adaptive reuse, landscape architecture & Urban planning, structures and technological systems, parametric architecture.

Download the information related to this competition here.

This award/grant/scholarship announcement was submitted by an ArchDaily user. If you'd like to submit a competition, call for submissions or other architectural 'opportunity' please use our "Submit Grants, Scholarships & Awards" form. The views expressed in announcements submitted by ArchDaily users do not necessarily reflect the views of ArchDaily.

• Sustainability

世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!

想浏览archdaily中国吗, you've started following your first account, did you know.

You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.

You are here

• Haverford College homepage
• Research & Publication
• Senior Thesis Resources

Prize-Winning Theses

Haverford college libraries, anthropology: wyatt macgaffey thesis award.

Classics: Daniel Gillis and Joseph Russo Prize

Comparative Literature: Barbara Riley Levin Prize

Economics: Holland Hunter '43 Thesis Prize

English: Newton Prize in English Literature

English: Terry M. Krieger '69 Memorial Prize

Linguistics: Outstanding Thesis

Linguistics: Prize in Application

Linguistics: Prize in an Experimental Topic

Linguistics: Prize in Description

Linguistics: Prize in Linguistics Theory

Mathematics: The Mathematics and Statistics Thesis Prize

Philosophy: Charles Schwartz Memorial Prize

Political Science: The Harvey Glickman Prize

Political Science: Herman M. Somers Prize

Spanish: Manuel J. and Elisa P. Asensio Prize

Search form

• Admission & Aid
• Campus Life

Information For

• Prospective Students
• Current Students
• Faculty & Staff
• Family & Friends

Admission Info

• Why Haverford?
• Join Mailing List

Social Networks

Welcome, friend..

Hit enter to Search all of Haverford for search .

Black Squirrel Search Suggestions *

* We have a very tiny magic 8 ball.