Audrie Jacky Siahainenia has won the Cover Prize 2016. The cover of his thesis, an ‘edited fishing photo’, won a third of the 1718 on-line votes. Second prize went to Janneke Ouwerkerk (‘Akkermansia’), who, with 23 percent, won nearly a fourth of the votes. Third place, with 10 percent of the votes, was for Ynte van Dam (‘thinking and doing’).
Jacky Siahainenia was happily surprised by the news. He had studied the effects of small-scale fishing on the protected mangrove areas along the coast of East Kalimantan. The cover of the thesis shows an edited photo of a local fishing boat. The gold-coloured boat is in sharp contrast to the blue background.
‘The photo was taken by the boat’s capitain when we were doing fieldwork there,’ he explained. In the middle of the publication’s blue back cover is the image of a small man. That little man is Siahainenia, who wants to learn to ‘understand the dynamics and complexity of the magrove system in this part of the Sulawesi Sea.’
Support
Siahainenia contacted a large number of people and asked them to vote for his cover: Facebook, Linkedin, WhatsApp, the two chaired groups he worked with, his friends in Wageningen and Indonesia and the fishermen in East Kalimantan with whom he had worked. With so much support, he was almost certain to win the prize.
Siahainenia, who took his PhD in August, still lives in Wageningen and is looking for a job. ‘I would like to continue to do research at an organisation devoted to the management and conservation of the marine resources that are so essential to feeding future generations. But the future of someone with a PhD is always uncertain.’