Eighteen students completed their bachelor's degree in 2020 with a thesis that was labelled ‘excellent’ by their faculty. Here you will find a short introduction to these excellent theses in the form of an "elevator pitch" from each student, plus a video in which the supervisor briefly addresses the lucky winner.

Francine Fijen

 School of Business and Economics  |  Bachelor Econometrics and Operations Research

"The Search for a Moving Target: Under the object’s worst case initial position"

Francine's elevator pitch 
A single object moves between two locations according to a known Markov transition matrix. Player 1 assigns the object to a starting location. Oblivious of this decision, Player 2 searches a location. If the object is found, the game terminates. Otherwise, the object may move and Player 2 searches again, adhering to restrictions imposed on their actions. Player 1 aims to maximise the expected search time. Given this worst-case scenario, player 2 aims to minimise the expected search time. The aim is to determine how different restrictions on Player 2’s abilities affect both players’ optimal strategy, and the game value.

Eighteen students completed their bachelor's degree in 2020 with a thesis that was labelled ‘excellent’ by their faculty. Here you will find a short introduction to these excellent theses in the form of an "elevator pitch" from each student, plus a video in which the supervisor briefly addresses the lucky winner.

Marc Mertens

 School of Business and Economics | Bachelor International Business

"Under Pressure: Implications of a Competitive Shock on Alliance Portfolio Diversity"

Marc's elevator pitch 
What would you do as a corporate executive if the position of your competitors improves overnight? This is not a hypothetical scenario. Competitive external shocks occur frequently, and one way managers can respond is through strategic alliances. Therefore, the resulting alliance activity will impact the composition, and more specifically the diversity, of companies' alliance portfolios. A natural experiment that was created by the ASEAN–India Free Trade Agreement reveals that rising cost-pressures and future uncertainty make simple, homogenous portfolios more attractive. Managers who utilize this finding can pre-empt their rivals, devise appropriate contingency plans, and thus create a sustained competitive advantage.

Eighteen students completed their bachelor's degree in 2020 with a thesis that was labelled ‘excellent’ by their faculty. Here you will find a short introduction to these excellent theses in the form of an "elevator pitch" from each student, plus a video in which the supervisor briefly addresses the lucky winner.

Kevin van Abswoude

 School of Business and Economics | Bachelor Fiscal Economics

"The migration of football players in response to tax rates"

Kevin's elevator pitch 
This Bachelor Thesis deals with the relationship between personal income tax rates and migration patterns of professional football players. As footballers are likely fall in the highest tax bracket, taxes could play a major role in determining a player’s career path. This thesis designs a research using a multiple linear regression model. The identified variables underlying the percentage of foreign football players are a country’s tax rates, average wages, percentage of foreigners and UEFA country coefficients. Hopefully, future research provides a definitive answer whether personal income taxes play a significant role in the migration patterns of football players.

Eighteen students completed their bachelor's degree in 2020 with a thesis that was labelled ‘excellent’ by their faculty. Here you will find a short introduction to these excellent theses in the form of an "elevator pitch" from each student, plus a video in which the supervisor briefly addresses the lucky winner.

Jule Hodok

 School of Business and Economics | Bachelor Economics and Business Economics

"An Analysis of Cooperative Behaviour in Games"

Jule's elevator pitch 
Economic theory traditionally relies on the assumption that agents are fully rational. Aggregated individual behaviour is explained with human greed at the centre of thought while other social motives are left unconsidered. However, contemporary research reveals a systematic deviation from rational actions. My thesis investigates the emergence of cooperation in games. I used a Competitiveness-Cooperativeness-Index to measure the cooperative temptation in a Prisoners’ dilemma setup and conducted an experiment to examine the predictive power of the Index. My results provide strong evidence against human behaviour that is solely based on pure self-interest as well as empirical support for the theory of the Competitiveness-Cooperativeness-Index.

Eighteen students completed their bachelor's degree in 2020 with a thesis that was labelled ‘excellent’ by their faculty. Here you will find a short introduction to these excellent theses in the form of an "elevator pitch" from each student, plus a video in which the supervisor briefly addresses the lucky winner.

Jette Banning

 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences | Bachelor European Studies

"(Non)European Others? The Role of Identity in ENP: A Comparative Study of EU Discourse on Tunisia and Ukraine"

Jette's elevator pitch 
Scholars largely define Eastern and Southern ENP as interest-driven due to illegal migration and terrorism in both regions, while European values matter insignificantly: Interests and values stand in trade-off. Assuming this trade-off, it seems puzzling that the values’ role diverges in the two ENPs even though both regions bear EU security-interests. So, why is it really, that values discourse differs?

To investigate this, a social-constructivist argument on identity is made. A discourse analysis of EU documents on Tunisia and Ukraine shows how Tunisia is perceived as more distinct from European identity than Ukraine. Ukraine’s constructed ‘Europeanness’ opposed to Tunisian ‘Orientalism’ explains why the EU shares its values with Ukraine unlike Tunisia, a partner not akin to European identity.

Thereby this research highlights the importance of values and identity rather than interest-arguments which dominate literature.

Eighteen students completed their bachelor's degree in 2020 with a thesis that was labelled ‘excellent’ by their faculty. Here you will find a short introduction to these excellent theses in the form of an "elevator pitch" from each student, plus a video in which the supervisor briefly addresses the lucky winner.

Greta Magnani

 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences | Bachelor Arts and Culture

"Female Anger. You ask: why give anger a gender?"

Greta's elevator pitch 
After some research within the feminist literature in relation to the #MeToo movement has revealed, female anger is an emotion which plays a significant role within the workings of this social movement. However, due to its societal pre-conceptions and historical suppression it has not yet gained the focus of attention it deserves. In this Thesis, I investigate what type of anger is being supported by feminists in practice. Is it a productive and future-oriented anger, or one that remains stuck in the past holding
retributive wishes? By relying on Nussbaum’s three types of anger, using a re-adaptation of feminist CDA, and analysing a sample of the voices of #MeToo, the complexity of the matter, but also the potency and revolutionary force female anger holds, if used consciously, is underlined.

Eighteen students completed their bachelor's degree in 2020 with a thesis that was labelled ‘excellent’ by their faculty. Here you will find a short introduction to these excellent theses in the form of an "elevator pitch" from each student, plus a video in which the supervisor briefly addresses the lucky winner.

Joanne Snel

 Faculty of Science and Engineering | University College Maastricht

"'The ‘fatherhood penalty’: How fathers’ use of parental leave impacts their wages"

Joanne's elevator pitch 
In stark opposition to the motherhood penalty, working fathers tend to observe higher earnings relative to childless men. Due to a recent shift in family policy and gender expectations in the West, fathers are assuming a more active role in childcare, including taking up (longer periods of) parental leave. One such reform can be seen in Germany, where, since 2007, fathers are entitled to two months of non-transferable parental leave. In my thesis, I perform a panel analysis of men’s earnings to explore whether these fathers who opt to take leave incur wage penalties, as mothers do. 

Eighteen students completed their bachelor's degree in 2020 with a thesis that was labelled ‘excellent’ by their faculty. Here you will find a short introduction to these excellent theses in the form of an "elevator pitch" from each student, plus a video in which the supervisor briefly addresses the lucky winner.

Lucas Uberti-Bona Marin

 Faculty of Science and Engineering | Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering 

"Learning to learn: a drug resistance learning pipeline"

Lucas' elevator pitch 
I worked on building predictive models that tried to determine the effectiveness of different cancer drugs on patients based on their gene expression. For this I used three large pharmacogenomic studies. 

The main objective was to test out many different possible configurations for these predictive models as to determine which ones would perform best. After testing over 100k configurations I managed to obtain models that performed 642% better than my baseline. This led to further insights into the Machine Learning techniques that can work best when handling high-dimensional regression on different datasets.

Eighteen students completed their bachelor's degree in 2020 with a thesis that was labelled ‘excellent’ by their faculty. Here you will find a short introduction to these excellent theses in the form of an "elevator pitch" from each student, plus a video in which the supervisor briefly addresses the lucky winner.

Ruben Tammaro

  Faculty of Science and Engineering | Maastricht Science Programme

"In Silico Tomography of Membrane-Embedded Mycobacterial Type VII Secretion Systems"

Ruben's elevator pitch 
In my thesis I have developed an automated pipeline for the generation of simulated electron microscopy data of the ESX-1 protein complex, involved in the infection by Mycobacterium Tuberculosis. The pipeline can now be employed to generate training datasets for artificial intelligence algorithms, which would then be used to detect and identify ESX-1 in real experimental data, which would lead to the determination of its three-dimensional structure, a task that so far has not been accomplished. Knowing the structure of ESX-1 will allow for the development of novel strategies to combat and prevent tuberculosis worldwide. 

Eighteen students completed their bachelor's degree in 2020 with a thesis that was labelled ‘excellent’ by their faculty. Here you will find a short introduction to these excellent theses in the form of an "elevator pitch" from each student, plus a video in which the supervisor briefly addresses the lucky winner.

Imke van der Velden

  Faculty of Science and Engineering | University College Venlo 

"Instagram intervention for increasing adolescents' intention to adhere to a healthy Plant-based Diet"

Imke's elevator pitch 
The widespread presence of obese and overweight adolescents is considered a global public health crisis. Consuming more fruits and vegetables and less highly processed, high-energy dense junk food could benefit adolescents’ current and future health. Such dietary pattern can be referred to as a healthy plant-based diet. The widespread accessibility and usage of social media by adolescents makes it a prominent platform for interventions targeting health behaviors. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the effect of an Instagram intervention on the intention to adhere to a healthy plant-based diet in Dutch adolescents. ​