Academic Awards 2025 booklet

63 General comments about the works submitted The TU/e community can take pride in the fantastic work being done by our EngD 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 EngD programs, as well as direct coupling to and impact on important and timely challenges faced in society and industry. The majority of nominated theses were awarded cum laude by the individual assessment committees. 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 clients, and often more widely beyond the direct project team. Winner of the award We propose to give the award to Tom Bertens (EE) for their thesis entitled “Toward understanding wear particle generation on silicon wafers” . The thesis work was ranked in first place by all jury members in their independent private assessments and was unanimously the consensus winner for the full jury. The topic of this work was to understand the complexities of contact between silicon wafers and lithography machine components at the micrometer level, in the context of a collaboration between VDL and TU/e on active contamination control in the manufacturing of integrated circuits. This is a fundamental problem of critical importance in the semiconductor industry. While numerical results had been obtained in the team, Bertens designed and executed a detailed empirical study, and obtained the first experimental results corresponding to the numerical findings. This required a deep level of mastery of advanced microscopy techniques and installation and mastery of a new state of the art indentation and scratch device. The obtained results provide critical foundations for further success of the collaboration and follow-on projects at VDL. The extensive studies Bertens successfully designed and executed provided the client with valuable new statistical insights, providing foundations on which current projects can be based and rolled out in the organization. The contributions met and exceeded the expectations of the client. Indeed, the project design, methodological approach, and execution were of the highest level of clarity, quality, and impact. The thesis was very well organized and written, an excellent scientific and professional documentation, providing both complete and convincing presentation of the core results as well as solid theoretical and contextual grounding. The outstanding scientific contributions were published in the International Journal of Solids and Structures . For this excellence in thesis work, Bertens’ contribution was awarded cum laude by the independent EngD assessment committee. The partner company was also positively impacted,  REPORT OF THE JURY