SOM Awards for Wout de Vries, Vincent Kunst, Tom Boot and Floor Rink

As part of a Season’s Celebration video presentation SOM’s director Gerben van der Vegt presented the four SOM awards. Usually, the awards for Best Research Master Graduate and Best PhD thesis are presented at the PhD conference in March but due to the COVID-19 crisis the conference had to cancelled.

Best Research Master Graduate 2019

Wout de Vries , the Best Graduate of the Research Master Economics & Business, was awarded 1,000 euro's. His master thesis “Leadership in the face of a looming threat: The Brexit referendum” supervised by Prof. Harry Garretsen en Prof. Janka Stoker was awarded with a grade 9. Wout is now working as a PhD candidate at FEB. The other two nominees were Guido Berends and Amber Werkman. They also work at FEB as PhD students.

Best PhD Thesis 2019

The award of 1,500 euro was for Vincent Kunst for his thesis “Institutional distance and institutional complexity in international business”, supervised by Prof. Sjoerd Beugelsdijk and André van Hoorn. His thesis contains high-quality chapters that have been published in excellent journals like the Journal of Management. Vincent is now working as an assistant professor at the University of Liverpool. The other nominees were Joost van de Brake and Chenyong Xiao, both working at FEB.

Outstanding Junior Researcher 2019/20

The 2,000 euro prize for junior researcher was awarded to Tom Boot. He obtained his PhD degree in 2015, and he already published several articles in topjournals like the Journal of Econometrics and the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics. In addition, he recently obtained a NWO VENI grant for a project on Forecasting Accuracy. The other two nominees were FEB researchers Joost van de Brake and Milena Nikolova.

Outstanding Researcher 2019/20

Floor Rink , professor of organizational behavior at FEB was awarded 2,500 euro by the SOM Board for her overall performance. Floor Rink has numerous publications, has successfully supervised PhD students and received a NWO VIDI grant for a project on Internal and External Regulation of Top Management Decisions in 2016. She is currently associate editor of the highly reputed Academy of Management Journal. To help bridge science and practice, she regularly gives public speeches on her research.