The Georges Giralt PhD Award is an annual award given by EURON for the best PhD thesis in Europe. The aim is to encourage high-quality work amongst young researchers in their first research period. The prize consists of a diploma and a cash award. In addition, the authors of all short-listed theses are offered an opportunity to publish their thesis as a monograph with Springer.

The PhD award is named the Georges Giralt PhD Award in recognition of the significant effort made by Georges Giralt (LAAS) to set up and maintain a European community in robotics.

To be eligible for the award, the thesis must not only be ofhigh quality and have been placed in the Theseuron thesis repository, but also have been examined during the calendar year prior to the Call. Any student who has been awarded a PhD degree within the time period can submit their thesis for consideration, though only those who study in a member of EURON can receive the money. In addition to the thesis a CV and a list of publications related to the work have to be submitted, together with a letter of recommendation from the advisor. An panel of EU researchers then evaluates the full package and selects a winner. Major emphasis is placed on a good evaluation of the impact of the research results.

The submission period is September each year, for theses dated the previous year. Deadline for the 8th award: October 31st. More details

Abstracts of prizewinning theses (and many others also) are available through Theseuron, the Euron PhD respository.

Two prizes were awarded in 2008, one for a Core Robotics thesis and one for a more applied, Technology Transfer, thesis.

CONGRATULATIONS!
to the Technology Transfer winner:

Eduardo Rocón of the Instituto de Automática Industrial, Spain; for his thesis "Active reduction of pathological tremor of superior limbs by means of robotic exoskeletons.

Congratulations also to the two runners-up:

Matthijs T. J. Spaan, Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands: "Approximate planning under uncertainty in partially observable environments"; and
Vincent Duindam, The Netherlands: "Port-Based modeling and control for efficient bipedal walking".

CONGRATULATIONS!
to the Core Robotics winner:

Cyrill Stachniss of the University of Freiburg, Germany; for his thesis "Exploration and Mapping with Mobile Robots.

Congratulations also to the two runners-up:

Andreas Nuechter, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat Bonn, Germany: "Semantic three dimensional maps for autonomous mobile robots"; and
Samir Bouabdallah, EPFL, Switzerland: "Design and control of quadrotors with application to autonomous flying".

Previous award winners.

We hope that you will get involved in many of EURON's activities and encourage others to do so as well.

Attending meetings is an excellent way of making contacts and friends within the community. These contacts are normally interesting, and may also be useful!

EURON Schools are aimed at PhD students so are particularly good for people wishing to deepen an already existing interest. [ More details  ... ]

Your knowledge and resources are valuable — please consider sharing them with others by adding items to the databases, contributing your opinions to the roadmap and benchmarking initiatives, and your information to this website.

Especially, please contribute to the Video Collection for Students asap.

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Make use of the resources that EURON offers. Much of the information is freely available to all, but for other resources you have to be a EURON member. Apply for the grants, use the databases and the contacts, apply for the awards, use the mailing lists.