Academic Awards 2025 booklet

37 In addition, he won the Student/Early Career Research Talk Award at the NMR-DG meeting hosted at TU Twente. Nick’s accomplishments are exceptional even by PhD standards; his Master thesis reads as a mini-PhD thesis. The thesis demonstrates an extraordinary level of academic maturity, independence, and scientific depth. The fact that Nick accomplished all this while actively contributing to major extracurricular activities makes his achievements even more impressive. He is a Co-Founder and Chair of BOOST –a Brabant-based development agency subsidizing student teams. In addition, he was the Project Manager of SOLID, an award-winning student team pioneering hydrogen storage technology (and is still a Board member). Laudatio Motivation: In his thesis, Nick Hol proposes Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) for analyzing the sedimentation and consolidation processes of marine sediments. Tens of millions of tons of sediment is dredged annually in European harbours and riverbeds, part of which could be used as a cost-effective building material. For this purpose, this fine-grained material's sedimentation and consolidation processes should be analyzed and understood. Various conventional techniques are available but have serious drawbacks such as low resolution and a destructive nature. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) imaging mitigates these problems. Using small-scale, 1D NMR systems, one can get direct information on water content, pore size distributions, concentration, diffusion, among other options. However, this technique is slow. To address this issue, Nick developed two novel NMR methods. First, he developed 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 important for assessing the internal structure and mechanical properties of sediments. The graduation project was awarded 10/10. The thesis resulted in 2 journal publications with Nick as first author, a third paper with him as second author, and 2 posters at conferences. Nick also won the Student/ Early Career Research Talk Award at a conference hosted at TU Twente. Nick’s accomplishments are exceptional even by PhD standards; his Master thesis reads as a mini-PhD thesis. His thesis demonstrates an extraordinary level of academic maturity, independence, and scientific depth. Notably, Nick accomplished all this while actively contributing to major extracurricular activities. This is very impressive. Nick was the Project Manager of SOLID, an award-winning student team pioneering hydrogen storage technology, and is still acting as a Board member. He also is a Co-Founder and Chair of BOOST – a Brabant-based development agency subsidizing student teams. On behalf of the jury, I am happy and honored to present you with the TU/e 2024-25 Master of Science Thesis Award. It is well deserved. Congratulations.