This award, initiated in 2008, is presented to the student, or students, nominated by their UNIGIS sites for submitting the best MSc thesis (or paper) during the academic year. This year the competition was very tight with nine excellent high quality MSc theses being considered by the review panel. In the end the panel decided to make four awards.The winner of the Academic Excellence Prize for 2014 was Heidi El Hosaini (UNIGIS UK), the first runner up was Trang Minh VoPham (USC) and in joint third place were Cátia Sofia Alves Gouveia (UNIGIS Portugal) and Stefan Mayer (UNIGIS Salzburg). The Review Panel would like to commend and congratulate these individuals and the other candidates for the high quality of work.
Winning thesis topics:
- Heidi El Hosaini (UNIGIS UK) "Locating and positioning solar panels in a 3D city model – a case study of Newcastle".
- Trang Minh VoPham (UNIGIS USC) "Integrating Landsat and California Pesticide Exposure estimation at aggregated analysis scales: accuracy assessment of rurality".
- Cátia Sofia Alves Gouveia (UNIGIS Portugal) "Predicting the impacts of climate change on the distribution and conservation of endemic forest land snails of Madeira Island".
- Stefan Mayer (UNIGIS Salzburg): "An approach to model the thermal demand of buildings. A case study using two districts of Graz".
