The School honours outstanding research work at the master’s and PhD levels
April 29, 2025
The Master of Science (MSc) Program Office and the PhD Program Office presented the best doctoral thesis awards, the best Master’s thesis award, and the Esdras Minville Award for 2024.
Three awards were given for the best doctoral thesis defended in 2024:
- Best thesis in Human and Social Sciences: Chau Minh Nguyen, under the co-supervision of Professors Yany Grégoire and Marcelo Vinhal Nepomuceno.
- Best thesis in Natural Sciences and Technology: Florian Carichon, under the supervision of Professor Gilles Caporossi.
- Best thesis written in French: Julie Gauneau, under the supervision of Professor Caroline Lambert.
The best Master’s thesis award was presented to Marie-Laure Badiel, whose thesis was supervised by Georges Dionne.
Finally, Maedeh Sharbaf, whose PhD was supervised by Valérie Bélanger and Marie-Ève Rancourt, received the 2024 Esdras Minville Award for an article published in Omega.
A $2,000 prize was awarded to the winner of the best Master’s thesis award, and a $3,000 prize was awarded to the other winners.
Doctoral program director Denis Larocque with laureates Chau Minh Nguyen, Marie-Laure Badiel and Julie Gauneau, Master's program director Sihem Taboubi and laureate Florian Carichon.
Chau Minh Nguyen
Chau Minh Nguyen’s thesis applies machine learning and quantitative methods to the fields of charity advocacy and service failures. She encourages brands to adopt long-term marketing perspectives through a well-being lens.
In the first essay, she analyzes musicians’ charity advocacy on social media, comparing it to commercial and personal messages. Regular advocacy messages boost music sales and enhance authenticity, while intermittent ones do not.
In the second essay, she shows that customers filing complaints aimed at harming a firm will have reduced long-term loyalty, unlike those making solution-seeking complaints. She also identifies the types of failures and relationships that predict the type of complaint.
Marcelo Vinhal Nepomuceno, Yany Grégoire, Chau Minh Nguyen and Denis Larocque.
Florian Carichon
Florian Carichon’s thesis focuses on the automation of document summarization, in order to condense online content while preserving essential details. He examines how the purpose of the summary (quick overview or detailed information) and the target audience (general readers or specialists) influence the creation of summaries.
The author reviews existing methods and classifies them according to their treatment of information relevance. He tests his ideas on three real cases that explicitly evidence the importance of the audience and purpose in improving the quality of summaries. He also highlights the shortcomings of current datasets and evaluation methods, proposing key elements for developing better automatic summarization algorithms.
Gilles Caporossi, Florian Carichon and Denis Larocque.
Julie Gauneau
This doctoral thesis examines diversity initiatives in organizations and the tools for measuring their performance through three articles.
The first article examines the evolution of diversity discourses in LVMH’s annual reports between 2002 and 2019, revealing a contradictory double discourse. The second article explores the tensions related to the development of social impact indicators for an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) action plan deployed within a police department facing complaints of racial profiling. The third article addresses—through autoethnography—the issues of epistemic injustice and privilege encountered during the deployment of this same action plan.
Caroline Lambert, Julie Gauneau and Denis Larocque.
Maedeh Sharbaf
The article by Maedeh Sharbaf, co-authored with Valérie Bélanger, Marilène Cherkesly, Marie-Ève Rancourt and Giovanni Michele Toglia, presents a method for designing shelter networks in flood-prone areas, using Haiti as an example. The research team developed an optimization tool to help choose the best shelter locations, while minimizing risk and maximizing coverage of vulnerable populations. It used geographic data and collaborated with the World Bank and the Government of Haiti.
This method strengthens natural disaster preparedness and responses by providing safer and more effective solutions for people affected by floods.
Marie-Ève Rancourt, Valérie Bélanger and Denis Larocque. (Missing from photo: Maedeh Sharbaf : Maedeh Sharbaf .)
Marie-Laure Badiel
Marie-Laure Badiel’s Master’s thesis assesses public debt sustainability, specifically for emerging countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, in the face of climate and demographic transitions. The author examines the effect of GDP-indexed bonds on public debt stability, using the difference-in-differences method on data spanning from 2002 to 2022.
The results show that issuing such instruments could contribute significantly to reducing the volatility of the debt ratio, especially when the indexation coefficient is low, and the indexed debt represents at least 30% of public debt. The author recommends these mechanisms for stabilizing the public finances of emerging economies.
