On December 7, 2018, the rector's office honored all (former) PhD students of the University of Münster, who successfully completed their doctoral studies within the last year and whose dissertations were graded "summa cum laude", i.e., with distinction. The list of the 88 researchers, who were honored by rector Prof. Dr. Johannes Wessels, prorector Prof. Dr. Monika Stoll and prorector Prof. Dr. Regina Jucks, also contains four members of our ERCIS network: Dr. Friedrich Chasin and Dr. Hendrik Scholta from the Chair for Information Systems and Information Management (headed by Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Dr. h.c. Jörg Becker, Prof. h.c.), Dr. Pascal Kerschke from the Group of Information Systems and Statistics (headed by Prof. Dr. Heike Trautmann), and Dr. Sarah Sandmann from the Institute of Medical Informatics (headed by Prof. Dr. Martin Dugas). A complete list of all awardees can be found in the university's official press release (German only): https://www.uni-muenster.de/news/view.php?cmdid=9978

As part of this ceremony, the WWU further awarded the best PhD thesis per department with a dissertation prize and an accompanying prize money of 3500 Euro each. Within this category, the ERCIS was again successful, as Dr. Pascal Kerschke received the dissertation prize of the School of Business and Economics for his thesis on "Automated and Feature-Based Problem Characterization and Algorithm Selection Through Machine Learning" (https://d-nb.info/1151936758/34). An overview of all 14 prize winners can be found in the university's official press release (German only): https://www.uni-muenster.de/news/view.php?cmdid=9977