Student Modeler Award guidelines

2025 Syvitski Student Modeler Award
Applications due by January 24th, 2025
To apply, submit all of the following to csdms@colorado.edu by January 24thth, 2025:
* a digital copy of one of your relevant thesis chapters (please do not submit your entire thesis!), or a research paper (submitted to a journal, in press, or published) 
* a link to a public repository of your code with an open source license, and technical documentation
* contact information of your supervisor.
OR, nominate somebody by sending their contact information to csdms@colorado.edu by January 6thth, 2025. We will contact the nominee to request their application materials.
We will treat all submissions that are still to be published completely confidentially. Recipients of this year’s award will be announced in February 2025. 
CSDMS invites graduate students (and first year postdocs submitting research materials from their graduate training) from earth and planetary sciences to compete for the annual “CSDMS Student Modeler Award.” The award is in honor of Jaia Syvitski, CSDMS's founding executive director from 2007 to 2017, who has inspired countless modelers. 
If you have completed an outstanding research project in 2024, which involved developing an model that simulates the evolution of the landscape and seascape or that involves simulating the impact of environmental extremes, a modeling tool, or module linking technology, you can qualify for this award! Models can be on all earth surface topics that our community embraces; terrestrial, coastal, marine, hydrological, ecological, geodynamics, or involving landscapes and human dimensions.
Entries will be judged on the basis of ingenuity, applicability, and contribution toward the advancement of geoscience modeling by a panel of experts in the field. The jurors will look at the outstanding scientific problem the modeling effort tries to solve, and how modeling contributed to the solution. Important criteria are the description of the mathematical framework, how significant the contribution to science and society is, and whether the modeling crosses disciplinary boundaries or uses coupling techniques. We will also evaluate the presentation of the model results. The panel will score open source code contributions, review the codes and judge coding best practices. Codes that are in an open source language, are of a high quality, are modular, are well tested, run on a variety of platforms, and are user friendly will receive the highest points.
We’ll have a prize for the top submission! The top 2 submissions will be invited to provide a student keynote presentation at the CSDMS 2025 Annual Meeting, May 13th to 15th, 2025 at University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado. Travel support will be provided and will include airfare within the continental US (partial support will be available for international submissions), airport RTD service to Boulder, shared-lodging in conference hotel, breakfast and lunch each day and one banquet dinner.
The Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System deals with the Earth's surface-the ever changing, dynamic interface between lithosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and atmosphere. We promote the modeling of earth surface processes by developing, and disseminating integrated software modules that predict the movement of fluids, and the flux (production, erosion, transport, and deposition) of sediment and solutes in landscapes and their sedimentary basins.