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PhD Thesis Award

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Mathematics

2023-2024 grad student awards.

Bor-Luh Lin Thesis Award  

• Ngoc Anh Phan

2023-24 Outstanding Teaching Assistant Awards:

• Edward White
• Adriana Fernandez Quero
• Matthew Barber
• Jacob Van Grinsven
• Joseph Small
• Jose David Beltran Lizarazo

Fall 23 Ballad and Seashore Dissertation Fellowship

• Fatou Kineh Ndow
• Michael Loren Davis

Spring 24 Ballad and Seashore Dissertation Fellowship

• Niki Amaraweera Kalutotage

Fall 23 Graduate College Post-Comprehensive Research Fellowship

• Juan Felipe Ariza Mejia

Casey Anna Stone

Spring 24 Graduate College Post-Comprehensive Research Fellowship

• Michele Capovilla-Searle

2024 CLAS Dissertation Writing Fellowship

Community Engagement Graduate Assistantship for Iowa Sciences Academy  

• Joseph Starr

All News > UC Berkeley Job Market Paper Recognized for its Innovation and Policy Import by Inaugural CEGA Award

UC Berkeley Job Market Paper Recognized for its Innovation and Policy Import by Inaugural CEGA Award

The prize was awarded to Nick Swanson for his dissertation on under-training in informal markets in Burundi.

BERKELEY, CA (13 May, 2024) – A new job market paper co-authored by Nick Swanson , PhD Student in Economics at UC Berkeley, was recognized during Commencement on Saturday by the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) Doctoral Dissertation Prize in Development Economics for its outstanding research contributions.

Swanson’s job market paper — authored with Luisa Cefala (UC Berkeley), Pedro Naso (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences), and Michel Ndayikeza (University of Clermont Auvergne and University of Burundi) — explores a surprising discovery: that new agricultural technologies may not always sufficiently diffuse to a community from a handful of initial trainees because of network constraints. Their findings indicate that worker productivity and output are impeded by differences in the private and social returns to training.

“Essentially, we found that employer farmers comprised one network and laborers comprised another, and the two were pretty distinct,” says Swanson. “Employers were much wealthier and didn’t typically socialize with workers, which complicated the diffusion of agriculture extension trainings.”

Recognized for its technical strength, creativity, and significant policy relevance, the paper was selected from a competitive field by a review committee of UC Berkeley professors who specialize in development economics, including Edward Miguel, Supreet Kaur, and Frederico Finan.

“One of the core aspects that set Nick’s paper apart was its innovative approach to understanding labor market constraints and how they affect social and economic development in low- and middle-income countries,” says Miguel. “The paper’s findings expand our understanding of how informal networks can function and offer novel evidence relevant to practitioners and policymakers.”

The prize builds on CEGA’s existing support for graduate student research, including the Development Economics Challenge, a program that competitively awards seed funding to original research projects led by UC Berkeley PhD students. Since 2011, CEGA has awarded more than $800,000 to graduate student projects in over 30 countries. Swanson was a previous recipient of a seed grant through the Challenge.

Formerly known as the Journal of Development Economics Prize, CEGA assumed management of the award in 2023 and increased the value of the cash prize. Past winners of the Prize include Max Lauletta (2023), Arlen Guarin (2022), Christian Brown (2021), Isabela Manelici (2020), Anne Karing (2019), and Michael Walker (2018).

To learn more about CEGA’s support for graduate student research, visit the CEGA website or contact Samarth Bordia at bordia [at] berkeley [dot] edu.

The Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) is a hub for research, training and innovation headquartered at the University of California, Berkeley. CEGA generates insights that leaders can use to improve policies, programs, and people’s lives. Its academic network includes more than 160 faculty, 65 scholars from low- and middle-income countries, and hundreds of graduate students — from diverse academic disciplines around the world — that produce rigorous evidence about what works to expand education, health, and economic opportunities for people living in poverty.

CEGA Graduate Student Research

CO-Hub launches to advance African Scholarship in Global Development Research

2024 spring development economics challenge.

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• Department of Physics

Physics Ph.D. Graduate Xin Shi Receives Dan E. Wells Outstanding Dissertation Award

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May 12, 2024

Award Recognizes Significance and Impact of Research

Each semester, the Dan E. Wells Outstanding Dissertation Award is presented to a graduating doctoral student who has performed outstanding research and submitted the best dissertation to the College of Natural Science and Mathematics. The Spring 2024 recipient was Xin Shi, a physics Ph.D. graduate.

The award was announced on May 10 at the University of Houston Commencement for the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Shi received a certificate and an award of $1,000.

Shi’s dissertation is titled “Advancing Nontoxic, Antimony-based 1–2–2-type Thermoelectric Zintls.” His research focuses on the direct conversion of thermal energy, which is abundant in our environment, to electrical energy, which powers our society. Shi’s research was conducted under the supervision of Professor Zhifeng Ren, director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH.

Current thermoelectric materials that can help accomplish this conversion have been laborious to design, and they often contain toxic or scarce elements. Shi has made efforts to contribute in-depth understandings to the properties of promising thermoelectric materials fundamentally, and he has researched a new strategy to simultaneously design a series of nontoxic, highly performing thermoelectric compounds for potential applications. These advances will have an ongoing positive impact in future environmentally friendly energy sources.

He will next pursue postdoctoral research with the goal of becoming a research-active faculty member.

For the award, nominated dissertations are evaluated for the:

• Significance and impact of the research
• Originality of the work
• Quality of the scholarship, and
• Quality of the presentation and organization of the dissertation

- Kathy Major, College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics

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23 April 2023 Electronics 2022 Best Ph.D. Thesis Award—Winner Announced

As the Editor-in-Chief of Electronics (ISSN: 2079-9292), it is my great pleasure to announce the winner of the Electronics 2022 Best Ph.D. Thesis Award— Dr. Gabriele Patrizi , from the Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence, Florence, Italy. This award is for a Ph.D. student or recently qualified Ph.D. who has produced a highly anticipated thesis with great academic potential.

The award has been granted for the following thesis: “An Innovative Data-Driven Reliability Life Cycle for Complex Systems”

Dr. Gabriele Patrizi will receive CHF 800, a certificate, and a chance to publish a paper free of charge after peer review in Electronics in 2023.

On behalf of the evaluation committee—Prof. Dr. Ke Guan, Prof. Dr. Joao Soares, Prof. Dr. Valeri Mladenov, Prof. Dr. Stefanos Kollias, Prof. Dr. Amir H Gandomi, Prof. Dr. George A Tsihrintzis, and Prof. Dr. Martin Reisslein—I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the winner on his accomplishment. We would also like to thank all the applicants for submitting their exceptional theses and the Award Committee for voting and helping with this award.

Prof. Dr. Flavio Canavero Editor-in-Chief, Electronics

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