The Annual Best Doctoral Dissertation Award in the previous two school years was presented at the Serbian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, on 23 December 2021. Among 11 people who received awards for the school year of 2018/2019, there were two researchers from the IPB, Dr Tijana Milićević and Dr Miljan Dašić.
As stated on the Chamber’s website, the Award is presented for solutions applicable to industry and contribution to science, economy and social development in general.
Dr Tijana Milićević wrote and defended her doctoral dissertation in English under the title ’An Integrated Approach to the Investigation of Potentially Toxic Elements and Magnetic Particles in the Soil Plant-Air System: Bioavailability and Biomonitoring’ at the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Belgrade, on 3 December 2018. She carried out her doctoral work at the IPB Environmental Physics Laboratory, Department of Applied Chemistry, Faculty of Chemistry, University of Belgrade and Department of Bioengineering, University of Antwerp (Belgium) under the supervision of Professor Dr Aleksandar Popović and Dr Mira Aničić Urošević. In her dissertation, Dr Milićević studies an integrated approach to environmental risk assessment in the example of crops, specifically, vineyards. The award statement elaborates that the dissertation contributes to the awareness that by the introduction of the proposed integrated soil-plant-air system, agricultural production and environmental protection can be furthered. Integrated monitoring in the agricultural environment would contribute to the production advancement, and alleviation of polluting substances in agricultural production, but it would also yield more precise information on the mobility and bioavailability of elements which would be helpful to agricultural producers in determining the dosage of agrochemicals and product safety testing. Derived from her doctoral dissertation, Dr Milićević has published six papers in top international journals, two chapters in books, and she has presented more than 20 papers at international conferences.
Dr Miljan Dašić defended his doctoral dissertation titled ‘Modeling the Behaviour of Confined Dipolar and Ionic Systems’ at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Belgrade, on 23 September 2019. Dr Dašić worked on his PhD dissertation at the IPB Scientific Computing Laboratory under the supervision of Dr Igor Stanković. The Chamber’s website reports that the candidate realized his dissertation in the field of computing nanotribology, determining links and interaction consequences between structure and geometry in classical nanoparticle systems and long-range interactions. During doctoral studies, Dr Dašić completed an internship at the Material Design Division of Toyota Motor Europe, headquartered in Zaventem (Belgium), and after his return to Belgrade, he continued cooperating with Toyota. During this cooperation, research was carried out to develop a new computational simulation for the study of lubrication with ionic liquids, motivated by their application to friction and abrasion reduction in car engines. The developed simulations facilitate the molecular design of optimal ionic liquids, which simultaneously meet the requirements for small friction and wear prevention. According to Dr Dašić, the prime advantage of the use of computational simulations is the possibility of testing a wide range of parameters, which is not the case with experimental research with actual ionic liquids. The candidate has published six papers in SCI journals, four of which are directly linked to the content of PhD dissertation, the Chamber’s statement elaborates. The Serbian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has traditionally presented the Annual Best Doctoral Dissertation Award since 1968, and in the previous two years, there were 37 papers from 23 faculties nominated for the Award. Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, the Award was not presented last year, therefore, this time the Award was granted for two school years.
