Christian Hensel (RWTH Aachen University) wins EAPLS PhD Dissertation Award 2018

It is the great pleasure of the European Association on Programming Languages and Systems to announce the outcome of the EAPLS Best Dissertation Award 2018.

This award is given to the PhD student who has made the most original and influential contribution to the area of Programming Languages and Systems, and has graduated in 2018 at a European academic institute. The purpose of the award is to draw attention to excellent work, to help the career of the student in question, and to promote the research field as a whole.

The winner of this edition of the EAPLS Dissertation Award is

Dr. Christian Hensel (RWTH Aachen University, Germany), for his dissertation on

The Probabilistic Model Checker Storm – Symbolic Methods for Probabilistic Model Checking

supervised by Prof. Dr. Ir. Joost-Pieter Katoen Dr. David Parker. The winner was selected by a committee of international experts. Details on the procedure can be found at http://eapls.org/pages/phd_award/. The candidate theses were judged on originality, impact, relevance, and quality of writing.

The jury concluded that Christian's dissertation is an outstanding piece of work; it received the best marks amidst some very strong contenders. A summary of the jury's findings:

• The thesis addresses a very important problem and achieves impressive results.
  
• It is a significant improvement over the main existing model checkers.
  
• It introduces a new symbolic modelling language that unifies previously existing languages.
  
• The thesis is extremely detailed.
  
• The work already has a high degree of influence through being widely used for probabilistic model checking.

We offer Christian our heartfelt congratulations on his achievement. We are confident that it will be a sign of a long and distinguished scientific career.