Santiago Zanella wins the EAPLS Best PhD Dissertation Award 2011

It is the great pleasure of the European Association on Programming Languages and Systems to announce the outcome of the EAPLS Best Dissertation Award 2011.

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 the period from November 2010 up to November 2011 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 second edition of the EAPLS Dissertation Award is

• Dr. Santiago Zanella Béguelin
  École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris
  

for his dissertation on

• Formal Certification of Game-Based Cryptographic Proofs

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 unanimously that Dr. Zanella's dissertation is an outstanding piece of work; it ended first amidst some very strong contenders. A very short summary of the qualities of the thesis:

• It contains important results in a notoriously difficult area, by bringing together the different fields of cryptography and programming languages, with essential contributions from probability and complexity;\
• It has a potentially high impact, as already shown by the large number of citations;
• It has very wide scope, including theory, tool implementation and non-toy case studies;
• Despite the complexity of the subject matter, it is very well-written and readable.

The EAPLS heartily congratulates Dr. Zanella as well as his supervisor, Gilles Barthe, with winning the award. We believe that the quality of the work is a clear sign of a long and fruiful academic career in the area of Programming Languages and Systems.