The 2016 MERAC Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis in Theoretical Astrophysics is awarded to Dr Maria Petropoulou for her thesis on radiative instabilities and particle acceleration in high-energy plasmas with applications to relativistic jets of active galactic nuclei and gamma-ray bursts.

The 2016 MERAC Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis in Observational Astrophysics is awarded to Dr Yingjie Peng for his thesis on the simplicity of the evolving galaxy population and the origin of the Schechter form of the galaxy stellar mass function.

The 2016 MERAC Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis in New Technologies (Computational) is awarded to Dr Oliver Pfuhl for his thesis on an innovative design of two subsystems for the VLTI instrument GRAVITY: the fibre coupler and the guiding system.