The 2015 Dissertation Prize of the Global Neutrino Network has been awarded to Tri Astraatmadja, who was part of the Leiden/Nikhef ANTARES group during his PhD research. Astraatmadja receives the award for his thesis 'Starlight between the waves: In search of TeV photon emission from Gamma-Ray Bursts with the ANTARES Neutrino Telescope'.

This is the first year that the GNN Dissertation Prize is awarded. It recognises young postdoctoral candidates who have written an outstanding thesis and contributed significantly to the project. Primary criteria of the selection are the scientific quality, the didactics and the form of the thesis.

Astraatmadja has focused on the ANTARES telescope, which operated as a gamma-ray telescope. This is possible by searching for down-going muons produced in interactions of gamma-rays in the Earth’s atmosphere. He looked at the short time windows when satellite experiments had announced a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB). The sophisticated tools developed by Astraatmadja will make it possible for the much bigger KM3NeT detector to detect gamma-rays from a GRB with a significance of three standard deviations.