Thesis Award Competition
Brookhaven National Laboratory invites Ph.D. students to submit their thesis to the RHIC & AGS Thesis Award Competition. The purpose of the award is to recognize the most outstanding thesis related to research conducted at the RHIC, AGS, NSRL, Tandem, ATF, BLIP and EIC facilities. Two awards are available. Each recipient will receive a certificate of recognition and a check for $3,000 less applicable taxes.
Registration is now closed.
Rules & Eligibility
Theses submitted and defended between April 2024 and March 2025 are eligible for the award. Selections are made by a committee, appointed by the Users' Executive Committee (UEC) Chairperson, and are judged on clarity of presentation, originality, and physics content. The following documentation should be sent to userscenter@bnl.gov.
- An electronic copy of the thesis,
together with publications and/or reports
describing the work. - A letter of support from the applicant's
Ph.D. thesis advisor. - Two letters of support from physicists who
are familiar with the applicant’s research. - A statement of the applicant's contribution to the
research.
- A brief curriculum vitae, which explicitly
includes the date of the thesis defense.
CANDIDATES PLEASE BE ADVISED: The RHIC/AGS Users' Executive Committee has instituted new guidelines regarding plagiarism ("recycling text") for Thesis Award judging. Please see below.
RHIC/AGS Thesis Award Guidelines On Plagiarism:
Although the UEC acknowledges that what exactly constitutes plagiarism may differ across countries and cultures around the world, theses judged for the RHIC/AGS thesis contest will be subject to plagiarism rules similar to those in effect at most post-secondary academic programs in the US. This means that submitting any text as part of the dissertation that is not the original product of the student author of the dissertation without citing a clear reference for such text can be grounds for disqualifying the dissertation for award consideration.
Please contact the thesis award coordinator (Marzia Rosati) with questions about details of what is allowed and not allowed. Plagiarism policies for submitting academic work that are in place at any American university or college, which can be generally found on the web, are good reference for this. The RHIC/AGS Thesis Award judging committee reserves the right to uniformly apply or not apply an associated criteria commonly in the use at such academic institutions, including explicit computer plagiarism database checking of all dissertations.
On the possibility of using sentences verbatim or not substantially-modified which can be found in other published works that are written by the same author of the dissertation submitted, we also strongly recommend not including such text. Although this case will not likely result in disqualification, as long as the text passages in question are properly referenced and cited, it is still likely to detract from our ranking of the quality and the originality of the submitted dissertation.
