Master's student Energy and Environmental Sciences Lotte Top wins Rachel Carson Graduation Award 2023

Lotte Top, Master’s student of Energy and Environmental Sciences , has won the Rachel Carson Graduation Award 2023. It is a national prize for the best thesis on an environmental related subject, with a category for university students and one for students of higher professional education. The prize is organized by the Society for Environmental Expertise ( Vereniging Voor Milieukundigen, VVM ). With this award, the VVM aims to raise awareness for the graduation work of students in the field of environment and sustainability.

Lotte Top’s thesis ‘An energy systems model for optimising and analysing multi-energy projects’ is about the development of a customized analysis tool that can determine the composition and viability of a specific energy hub project. She used a step by step approach, starting with the requirements, based on interviews. The second step was a system analysis, continued by the definition of a conceptional model, flowed by the implementation in programming language Python. Finally, the model was tested with a case study of a crematorium. Lotte wrote her thesis as part of her internship at Summit Engineering.

Particularly this step wise approach convinced the jury that Lotte’s thesis was the well-deserved winner.

About Rachel Carson

The Graduation Award is named after Rachel Carson, the author of the book 'Silent Spring'. About fifty years ago, this book marked the beginning of widespread public awareness of global environmental issues.