And the winners of the 2021 EGSH PhD Excellence Awards are...

The award for Best Article 2021 goes to Chiara Carboni!

The award goes to Chiara Carboni. Chiara, congratulations on exceptional and successful effort to combine medicine, science and technology studies and sociology, to understand the digitization of health care. As you say, digitization of health care has been studied from many different perspectives but it is complex and difficult to bring these perspectives together into a comprehensive framework. You have done this successfully by integrating the outcomes of a series of studies through cognitive metaphors particularly slime molds to capture networks; scripts and stagehands to describe hierarchies and invisible work; and river engineering to understand workflows. We thought this was intellectually immensely challenging and brave, and we are impressed by the depth of the outcomes and the impact this will have on very different disciplines.

Congratulations, Chiara!

The award for Best Conference Paper 2021 goes to Vincent Baptist!

Vincent, your paper about the pre-war Schiedamse Dijk in Rotterdam is a perfect example of how the study of one street requires not only mastery of historical archives, but also an understanding of urban planning, sociology and philosophy. You have combined these excellently to assess the different meanings of Schiedamsedijk through time, moving from a street that was as famous as the German Reeperbahn, to a rather sanitized commercial “pleasure scape”, in what you call a safe mirror image of itself. As a result, the paper is not only a rich contribution to local Rotterdam history but also an important addition to our interdisciplinary understanding of wider urban processes.

Congratulations, Vincent!

The award for Best Poster 2021 goes to Ilse van de Groep!

There were relatively few submissions in this category, only five. It is likely that this was due to the COVID-crisis making live conferences almost impossible. The submissions were nicely divided across our discipline with one each from sociology, philosophy, psychology, socio-medical sciences and pedagogy. Our winning poster is the one of Ilse van der Groep, of the Erasmus Sync Lab, about Resisting Aggression in Social Context.

We like the balanced articulation of form and content, the effective usage of colour and icons, and the way these guide the reader through the research outcomes.

Congratulations, Ilse!

The award for Best Societal Impact 2021 goes to Joris Krijger and Tamara Thuis

It is rewarding to see how individual PhD candidates or larger research groups are becoming more and more oriented on achieving positive societal impact with their research. It is in their work that we see the Erasmus slogans becoming operational and effective. We had six submissions for the impact category, pertaining to media coverage, consultancy and advisory work. The initiative that we have awarded concerns a successful attempt to enhance the social responsibility and practices of large institutions and corporations in the way they handle their data and algorithms. It was inspired by what we know in Dutch as the Toeslagenaffaire, in which the Dutch Tax Office harassed recipients of benefits for years based on racist algorithms and tax officers. Two PhD candidates, Joris Krijger of the Erasmus School of Philosophy and Tamara Thuis of the Rotterdam School of Management took an initiative to prevent such abuse to repeat itself in the future.

Congratulations, Joris and Tamara!

The award for Best PhD Colleague 2021 goes to Luciana Dos Santos Duarte!

Luciana is the coordinator of the PhD council at the International Institute of Social studies. She lobbied strongly to secure teaching training opportunities for our PhDsd at the ISS, even though Luciana did not need that opportunity herself. She also regularly shares her experiences as a foreigner in the Netherlands to help other colleagues. A recent one was about her experiences in going through the Dutch labour market as a non-Dutch. Remarkably, Luciana shared all the documents she used in the application process for the benefit of other colleagues. This makes her stand out!

Thank you, Luciana!

The award for Best PhD Supervisor 2021 goes to Hester van de Bovenkamp!

According to her PhD candidates Hester gives them freedom and encouragement to follow their own PhD-path; she strikes a perfect balance between professional encouragement and reducing stress levels; she seems to be very good at ‘making big things small’, and when the PhD research seems to overwhelm her PhDs, she cuts up tasks in small pieces so that they become more manageable. The PhD candidates feel she genuinely cares about them, by spending quality time with them beyond supervision meetings. They conclude by saying that her disposition ‘to care’ is the bedrock that makes her the greatest supervisor!

Thank you, Hester!

The award for Best EGSH Teacher 2021 goes to the ISS team of Thea Hilhorst, Linda Johnson and Rodrigo Mena!

The choice for best teacher this year was relatively straightforward, as one of the teaching teams stood out in terms of subject importance, course evaluation and teacher performance.

The teaching team received a solid five out of five evaluation points from the participating students. One quote nicely summarizes the overall appreciation of the teaching:

Firstly, the teachers are very professional, the lecturers are very experienced in the field and there are many vivid cases in the class. Secondly, the course content is very practical, the section on internet security left a very deep impression on me and filled in the gaps in my knowledge. Finally  the teacher was very humorous and interacted a lot with the students, which made the atmosphere of the class relaxed and interesting. All in all, it was a great class.

Thank you, Thea, Linda and Rod!