Launched in 2021, and now in its fourth year, the CIB has issued a call for emerging researchers to participate in the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award 2025.
CIB, through the Future Leaders Committee, works to advance built environment research by recognizing and rewarding the outstanding work of emerging researchers, and the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award 2025 will be awarded in recognition of researchers whose PhD is considered worthy by an Awards committee appointed by the CIB Board. In selecting the award recipients, the Awards Committee considers the following: importance of the built environment issue; writing style, readability, and flow; methodology; and the contribution of the research.
Award
The Best Doctoral Dissertation Award carries with it a €1,500 cash prize for the winner and a €500 cash prize each for the 2 top runners-up.
Rules and eligibility criteria
The completed dissertation must have been confirmed by the faculty advisor no earlier than 18 months before the application deadline. The award eligibility period of 18 months will allow for students who might confirm the PhD at the end of the cycle to submit in the following year’s competition; however, students can only submit once. The author of the dissertation must be a member of a CIB Student Chapter, and those who submitted in 2024 are not eligible in 2025.
Doctoral candidates from all member institutions (Full and Associate) can apply irrespective of whether they have a CIB Student Chapter. Where there is a CIB Student chapter, the nominee from the university has to be a member of the CIB Student Chapter.
Only one submission can be made from each university with/without an active Student Chapter. Therefore, individual universities and CIB Student Chapters are responsible for deciding their process for selecting the lone nominee.
How to submit
Applicants need to submit the following documents:
- A detailed dissertation abstract in PDF format, not to exceed 4 pages. The abstract should explain the research question addressed in the doctoral thesis/dissertation, the importance of the research, how the dissertation builds on prior work, samples, hypotheses, methodologies, and research results.
- A letter from the researcher’s committee chair (in PDF format), not to exceed 2 pages, attesting that the completed dissertation was confirmed during the period 1 April 2024 and 30 September 2025. This letter may be in the form of a nomination and may include an assessment of the importance and quality of the work.
- The completed dissertation submitted in PDF format.
The submission should be made as an email attachment no later than 30 September 2025 to CIB Programme Director, Dr. Sina Moradi at sina.moradi@cibworld.org.
Shortlist selection
An Awards Committee selected by the CIB Board will evaluate all applications. The top 3 doctoral researchers will be notified by 1 November 2025 of their selection and, as part of the judging process, will be invited to deliver a presentation to the panel at an event open to all CIB members in November 2025, to compete for the CIB Best Doctoral Dissertation Award assessment. The short presentations will be followed by a question and answer session. A winner’s webinar will be held in early 2026.
The application deadline is 30 September 2025.
The recipient of the 2024 award was Hongying Zhao and information on her award is available here.
