Former Nikhef PhD candidate Clara Gatius Oliver has won the 2025 Jan Kluyver Prize for the best English-language summary of a dissertation. The prize was awarded at the Nikhef Jamboree 2026.
Gatius’s dissertation, “From the cosmos to the sea”, focuses on calibrating the underwater KM3NeT neutrino detector, a system of hundreds of lines with thousands of light sensors on the seafloor that are constantly in motion due to ocean currents but must collectively provide images of incoming particles. In addition, she investigated whether KM3NeT might be able to detect dark matter.
Gatius, who is originally from Catalonia, defended her dissertation in December 2025 at the University of Amsterdam. It included a Catalan summary. However, the Kluyver Prize jury primarily recognized the substantive originality of her summary.
In it, Clara Gatius adopts the perspective of a neutrino that strikes the Mediterranean Sea from space and is detected by KM3NeT.
She writes: “In less than half a millisecond I reached the bottom of the sea and then is when I had the biggest surprise. All of a sudden, I was surrounded by countless eyes, which seemed to all be looking at me. Aaaah!!! I screamed without being able to contain myself. Who is this?! And with the excitement and confusion of the moment I released all my energy creating a prodigious blast.”
The impact she is referring to, happened in early 2023. Two years later, after thorough analysis, it made global scientific headlines; the neutrino KM3-230213A was the most energetic particle ever observed and made the cover of the journal Nature for that achievement.
The impact of the superneutrino KM3-230213A ends in a massive light signal in the KM3NeT detector, which Gatius analyzed as a physicist, but which also reminds her of an immense candle: “For all the people who were forced to lose their lives in the Mediterranean Sea.”
Her feeling about this, she says, is one of deep contradictions. “On the one hand, we’re building a telescope for invisible particles in the Mediterranean Sea. In the same sea where, not far away, people are drowning as they try to reach a better life. I found—and still find—that difficult to reconcile.”
Gatius also describes KM3NeT in her summary as if it were a living being, with a dancing body and eyes. Deliberately, she says. “To me, KM3NeT feels a bit like a monster in the deep sea, with beautiful aspects that I’ve come to love but also with its darker side and contradictions”.
For Gatius, the culture, socio-historical context and in general, emotions certainly have a place in physics, a field that often pretends to be totally independent of those, and she questions the belief that scientific accounts of the world are neutral, non-political.
“Why are we curious about some things and not some others? Aren’t the questions we ask, as well as our experiments and theories, influenced by the current socio-cultural paradigms in our societies? Doesn’t it play a role in our decisions that we acquire sympathy for certain scientific projects or disciplines?”
She adds: “Physics, and in general science, is a mirror of the relations we stablish with our environment and the meaning we give to the world around us; from particles, to plants, animals, ecosystems, the starts or the cosmos. In other cultures, those relations and meanings can be very different from what physicists are used to.”
The title of her dissertation deliberately references the slogan that people around the world have been using to protest against the genocide happening in Palestine for already more than two years, “From the River to the Sea”.
During her PhD, Gatius was politically active with a group of students, PhDs, Postdocs and staff at the University of Amsterdam and within Nikhef. “What bothers me most is that although universities and scientific institutions are deliberately taking political stances by complying with the status quo, they portray themselves as neutral.”.
After completing her PhD in December, Gatius took a break from academia. She runs an organic farm with a collective, growing vegetables and delivering crates full of locally grown veggies to subscribers. The initiative is called Tuinen van het Roodborstje (The Robins’ Gardens), named after the first little birds the founders saw on the new land.
The prize money from the Jan Kluyver Prize provides a nice foundation for this interlude, says Gatius. She is considering delving deeper into the social and political factors that shape science, perhaps as a postdoc. Preferably in Catalonia, in Barcelona, “closer to my family and friends”.
KLUYVER PRIZE
The Kluyver Prize for the best English summary of a Nikhef dissertation is named after physicist and former Zeeman Lab director Jan Kluyver (1920–1989), one of the founders of Nikhef in 1975. The prize was established in 2010 and is awarded by the former directors of Nikhef. The prize consists of a check for 2,500 euros and is usually presented during the Nikhef Jamboree.
