We are proud to announce that Sara Gjorgjieva has received the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2026), held as part of IEEE WCCI 2026 in Maastricht, Netherlands.

Her award-winning paper, “On the Structural (Dis)Agreement of Landscape Representations in Black-Box Optimization”, co-authored with Eva Tuba, Barbara Koroušić Seljak, Carola Doerr, and Tome Eftimov, explores how different landscape representations capture structural properties in black-box optimization, providing new insights for benchmarking and algorithm understanding.

This recognition highlights the importance of research in black-box optimization, landscape analysis, and explainable benchmarking methodologies.

👏 Congratulations to Sara and the co-authors on this outstanding achievement!