Winners 2023

2023 Best Postdoctoral Published Paper Prize by a female postdoctoral scientist or for a postdoc paper with a central gender focus or feminist epistemology.

Winner: Dannieli Herbst

 

Jury: Roberto Cantoni, Oriol Marquet and Patrizia Ziveri

 

We decided to award the prize to the article 180 years of marine animal diversity as perceived by public media in southern Brazil, published by Dannieli Herbst in the journal PLOS ONE.

The paper has a novel approach and is relevant to scientists and policymakers, and has enjoyed good media coverage. The jury noted that it is interesting both in its approach and methods, and that it includes a historical analysis of journalistic publications on a topic that is usually investigated through other investigation means and as such is original.

 

2023 Best PhD Dissertation Prize for a female scientist or for a dissertation with a central gender focus or feminist epistemology.

Winner: Soledad Castro

 

Jury: Sara Maestre, Sandrine Gallois and Umberto Lombardo

 

We decided to award the prize to her thesis "Plantations, pesticides, and the State: The making and unmaking of the Térraba-Sierpe delta" studies the impacts of the intersection between pesticides and plantations in waterscapes from Costa Rica, on both social and ecological systems. Soledad’s research is highly grounded in empirical analysis, bringing new evidence from primary data.

According to the verdict of the jury, her research is not only strongly interdisciplinary, combining theoretical and methodological frameworks from both social and environmental sciences (political ecology and ecotoxicology), but also engages in critical reflexivity.

Additionally, Soledad has demonstrated her capacity to engage with both scientific and artistic languages to create not only an excellent scientific contribution but also an appealing and inspiring thesis. For all these reasons, they considered that Soledad stands out as embodying the criteria for this prize most effectively.

The jury emphasised the high quality of the theses, as well as the originality of the research, the rigor of the design and methods and the quality of the results, which are comparable for all the theses. In the assessment, they also considered other factors such as whether the research was conducted in a historically male-dominated field, the gender lenses taken by the research and the social impacts for women and gender issues in general.

Researcher Soledad Castro is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich (Switzerland).