Academic Awards 2025 booklet

35 General comments The jury enjoyed reading the nominees’ theses and was impressed by their high quality. Topics ranged from designing an equitable healthcare experience, organizational design structure for circular construction, and combustion fuel path control. There were also several contributions to the field of AI-based learning, for instance, in the context of brain-on-chip, traffic shaping, and supporting building design. The topics are highly relevant and timely. All nominations had substantial innovative and scientific quality; some had even been awarded 10 out of 10! All Master Theses were well-structured, and students explained their complex topics in an accessible way. Based on its two-step evaluation process, the jury unanimously identified one winner and thus made its final choice. Naming of the winner of the award The winner of the TU/e MSc Thesis Award 2025 is Nick Hol for his thesis “Development of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Methods for the Study of Marine Sediments” . Nick’s Master’s thesis combines scientific rigor, originality, interdisciplinary impact, and exceptional independence. Nick carried out this outstanding work under the supervision of Dr. Pel from the Transport in Porous Media (TPM) group of the Department of Applied Physics and Science Education (APSE). The project was conducted in close collaboration with the Civil Engineering department of Delft University of Technology, under the guidance of Dr. Chassagne and PhD candidate Ismail Myouri. It resulted in not one, but two first-author publications in peer-reviewed journals—a very rare achievement for an MSc student. The motivation: This thesis proposes using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) to analyze the sedimentation and consolidation processes of marine sediments. Millions of tons of sediment are dredged annually in European harbours and riverbeds. However, part of this could be used as cost-effective building material. Understanding the sedimentation and consolidation processes of this fine- grained material is thus key. Various conventional techniques are available but have serious drawbacks such as low resolution and destructive impact. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) imaging offers an alternative that overcomes these limitations. Using small-scale, 1D NMR systems one can get direct information on water content, pore size distributions, concentration, diffusion, among other options. However, NMR is conventionally a slow technique. In his thesis, Nick solved the problem by developing two novel NMR methods, optimizing NMR systems for the study of clay sediments. First, he proposed a fast multi-slice NMR protocol that enables high-resolution one-dimensional imaging of clay sedimentation dynamics. Second, he created a method for calculating the surface relaxivity of soft sediments. This parameter is required for assessing the internal structure and mechanical properties of sediments. The graduation project was awarded 10/10 and resulted in 2 journal publications with Nick as first author. A third paper with him as second author, and 2 posters at conferences also resulted from the research.  REPORT OF THE JURY