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Winners of best PhD thesis and best Master thesis awards 2023

Written by Tim Vantilborgh
Awards

During the 2023 BAPS annual meeting, the winners of the BAPS best PhD thesis award and the best Master thesis award were announced.

Best PhD thesis award 2023

A shortlist with three candidates was selected for this award. Their theses were read and evaluated by 5 jury members (Patrick Anselme, Axel Cleeremans, Adélaïde De Heering, Natacha Deroost, Steve Majerus). No jury member came from the same university as one of the candidates. The theses were evaluated on a 10-points scale. Based on this evaluation, the jury suggested to award the best PhD thesis award to Luc Vermeylen. We would like to congratulate the laureate, Luc Vermeylen, and we thank the jury members for their careful and thorough examination of the applications.

Winner: Luc Vermeylen (UGent): Thinking hurts: On the affective signatures of cognitive control

Shortlisted candidates (in alphabetical order):

  • “The role of goal-directed processes in the causation of seemingly habitual behavior” by Eike Kofi Buabang, KULeuven (supervisor: Agnes Moor; co-supervisors: Jan De Houwer & Marcel Brass)
  • “Thinking hurts: On the affective signatures of cognitive control” by Luc Vermeylen (UGhent) (supervisor: Wim Notebaert; co-supervisor: Senne Braem)
  • “The conceptualization and measurement of interoception” by Olivier Desmedt (UCLouvain) (supervisor: Olivier Luminet; co-supervisor: Olivier Corneille)

Best Master thesis award 2023

A shortlist with three candidates was sent to the National Committee at the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium. A jury composed of Prof. Eva Kemps (Flinders University, Australia), Prof. Evie Vergauwe (Université de Genève, Switzerland), and Prof. Mathieu Declerck (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) evaluated the three submissions. The evaluators reported that all three shortlisted master theses were of an excellent quality, for which they commended the three candidates. Nevertheless, the study about ‘Meaning maps’ by Maarten Leemans was found to be most outstanding. In the domain of visual attention, meaning maps represent the spatial distribution of semantic features within a scene. In his thesis, Maarten Leemans investigates what meaning maps do and do not measure. The reported empirical work is original and makes a strong contribution to our theoretical understanding of meaning maps. Despite the complexity of the theoretical perspectives and the sophistication of the adopted research method (i.e., eye- tracking), the candidate provides an impressively clear and nuanced discussion of his findings, also highlighting the broader implications for everyday attentional processing.

We would like to congratulate the laureate, Maarten Leemans, and we would like to thank the jury for their clear and thorough examination of the applications.

Winner: Maarten Leemans (KULeuven): Finding the meaning in meaning maps: An empirical and theoretical evaluation of meaning maps.

Shortlisted candidates (in alphabetical order):

  • Leemans Maarten (KULeuven): Finding the meaning in meaning maps: An empirical and theoretical evaluation of meaning maps.
  • Van Den Plas Lies (KULeuven): De invloed van beweging op executief functioneren bij atypische populaties: een meta-review.
  • Vernaillen Brent (UGent): Moving On: Neurochemical underpinnings of patch-leaving decisions in human foraging.

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