Academic Awards 2025 booklet

11 General comments about the works submitted The TU/e community can take pride in the fantastic work being done by our BSc students. The jury was greatly impressed by the ambition level of the projects that were carried out by all nominated candidates, reflecting the rich variety of exciting impactful projects in our BSc programs, as well as direct coupling to and impact on important and timely challenges faced in society and industry. The quality of the nominated theses varied from “very good” to “excellent”. The excellent reports not only presented a clear view on the work that has been done, but also demonstrated solid grounding in the relevant scientific communities and the current state of the art. In addition, these reports demonstrated how the candidates have actively and critically assessed during the project intermediate results in the light of the user requirements and project objectives and adapted dynamically the project if necessary. In all cases, the work was very well received by the respective scientific communities, clients or stake holders. Winner of the award The jury has unanimously selected the winner for the BSc Thesis Award 2025 to be Pascal Otjens from the Department of Applied Physics for his thesis “Algebraic Characterisation of Bivariate Bicycle Codes” . The jury was deeply impressed by the scientific rigour and originally of Pascal’s multi-disciplinary work, which resides at the border between Physics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics. His thesis was accessible yet of high quality and originality. Bringing the mathematical analysis into the problem, in particular, is recognised as the main originality of the work. This approach was supported by his broad academic background: Pascal earned a double Bachelor Degree in Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics and Honors Diploma in “Competitive programming and problem solving”. Pascal has proven to be a very mature and highly independent student. During his BSc thesis project, he barely required feedback to move forward and made rapid progress, despite the high complexity of the problem. The jury has also remarked the excellent quality of Pascal’s report, which was very clearly written, understandable to a broader scientific audience, yet preserving the necessary rigour. Laudatio for general audience Text drawn from the supervisors’ letter of support and the candidate’s dossier: Pascal Otjens’ BSc final project work provides a theoretically well-founded and therefore a deeper understanding of the physics and mathematics of quantum error correction. Quantum Error Correction is a relatively new research area that is crucial for designing robust quantum computers, urgently needed to enable their practically relevant applications. In particular, Pascal studied so-called bivariate bicycle codes that provide protocols for designing an error-resistant quantum architecture. Whereas the state-of-the-art literature uses brute-force calculations on a computer, Pascal took a different and novel approach.  REPORT OF THE JURY