On Tuesday I found out that my PhD thesis has been awarded a “Springer Thesis Award”! This comes with a small amount of money and, most importantly, means that my thesis will be re-published as a book and e-book as part of the Springer Theses series. This series brings together a selection of the very best PhD theses from a strictly limited number of high-ranking university research departments in the physical sciences and engineering.
I am absolutely thrilled to have received this award, which in its very essence goes to show two things. First of all, the amazing mentorship of my PhD advisor Katie Freese. She left me a lot of freedom to pursue my own research interests independently, and at my own pace, which was awesome. At the same time, she was tough on me especially in our first projects together, but I learned so much from that. And she was incredibly supportive during job application period. Second, the amazing research environment at the Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmoparticle Physics (OKC) at Stockholm University. Hopefully sooner rather than later, I plan to write a detailed blog post on why the OKC is an exceptional place (without exaggerating, one of the best in the world) for one to do their PhD if one is interested in cosmology, astroparticle physics, and astrophysics. For the moment all I can say is that if I could go back 100 times to the day when I had to make a decision about where to go for my PhD, I would choose the OKC again 101 times. For the occasion, the OKC also left a short official statement on their website announcing my winning this prize.
You can find my PhD thesis, whose title is “Weigh them all!: Cosmological searches for the neutrino mass scale and mass ordering”, on Stockholm University’s DiVA portal or on arXiv. The title bears a clear Game of Thrones reference and yes, if it wasn’t clear enough I am a GOT fan (and yes I am part of that rare minority who actually enjoyed S08). My favorite characters, for the record, are Ramsay, Tyrion, and Jaime.