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EuroVis PhD Award

EuroVis Annual Award for Best PhD Thesis

The EuroVis Best PhD Dissertation Award recognizes outstanding dissertations in academic research and development over topics relevant to visualization. The intent of this award is to recognize excellent young researchers in their early career and to highlight visualization research. The award is managed by the Best PhD dissertation committee, constituted by a Chair appointed by the EuroVis Steering Committee.

The current chair is Anna Vilanova.

EuroVis PhD Award 2025: Nominations can be submitted until January 31st, 2025.

Submission

The student’s advisor should nominate the candidate using the online form. The package must include:

  1. A nomination letter written by the student’s advisor, which includes:
  • the name, email address, and phone number of the advisor,
  • the name, email address, and CV of the candidate, and
  • a one-page summary of the significance of the dissertation (references to papers should be provided on an extra sheet)
  1. A copy of the dissertation.
  2. Optional additional letters of recommendation or assessments on the candidate thesis, such as reviewing or defense reports, can also be attached to the submission.

For questions, contact Anna Vilanova (eurovis-phd-award@eg.org)

Submission deadline

January, 31st 2025

Eligibility

All PhDs from the European visualization community (e.g., through contributions to the EuroVis conference) that defended and get awarded the degree of Doctor between Jan 1, 2023 and Dec 31, 2024 are eligible for the 2025 competition.

There is no limitation on the number of nominations that may be made by a university.

Invited STAR

Aligned with the Eurographics PhD Award, the awardees of the EuroVis PhD Award will offered the opportunity to publish the state of the art section of their thesis as a STAR in the Computer Graphics Forum Journal.

Selection Procedure

Four to six recognized members of the EuroVis community, selected by the Chair, will form a review committee to thoroughly review and assess the dissertation submissions. The committee will judge the dissertations based on their intellectual merit, technical depth, and presentation quality.

The committee is selected with prominent members of the EuroVis community. Their names are public to foster transparency and attest of the value of the awards. The selection is done after all the applications are received to avoid hard conflicts, i.e. advisors of applicants in the committee. The chair cannot be conflicted either so none of his former PhD students can apply during his term. Soft conflicts are possible: a committee member can be part of the institution of an applicant, either during the PhD or after, or have co-authored with the applicant. In that case, the committee member will not be able to speak about the application during the discussion and can decide or be asked to leave the discussion when it concerns the applicant in soft conflict. Prominent researchers are used to handling these cases when they participate in a selection or prize jury.

The selection is handled in two to three meetings, usually conducted through a videoconferencing system:

  1. They agree on the selection process, on the eligibility of the applicants, and get assigned four PhDs, each PhD being reviewed by two committee members. They will have to read and score them according to the scientific contribution, difficulty of the problem addressed, originality of the solution, quality of the writing/presentation, potential/effective impact, number of EuroVis publications. The citations according to Google Scholar are also collected, as well as the duration of the PhD, that varies widely throughout the institutions and countries. The information gathered is used to provide factual information to the debate, no automatic ranking or scoring is used to filter out  applicants.
  2. The committee meets again and discusses each of the PhDs. In the end, a shortlist of 2-6 PhDs is selected from intense discussions. A major rule is to remain positive about all the PhDs. Each member of the committee needs to complete their reading of all the shortlisted PhDs for the next meeting and provide a full ranking (except for the soft conflicts obviously).
  3. The committee meets and compares the ranking, discussing the differences in the ranking to achieve a consensus. It can decide to select up to 3 PhDs to be awarded.