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Education and Research Awards 2025 |
| Project Management Doctorate of the Year |
This award recognises an excellent doctoral thesis in a project management related subject. Professional doctorates are also eligible in this category.
The doctorate must have been awarded in the academic year 2023/2024 (if you are unsure if you qualify in this academic time frame please contact awards@apm.org.uk for clarification before applying, giving details about your academic years/graduation date/university and course). A doctoral thesis may only be entered into this category once. Entrants can be members or non-members of APM, from both in and outside of the UK.
Entries should take the form of a 1,000-word personal statement OR an 8-minute video (in English), addressing the criteria below. The entry must be accompanied by the full thesis as a PDF document and a supporting letter from the entrant’s supervisor and/or external examiner including confirmation that the doctorate has been awarded.
Congratulations and good luck to all our finalists...
Finalist | Philip Harbin, Grand Canyon University - Occupational Stress as Described by Practicing Professional Information Technology Project Managers
Project managers across industries and cultures add significant value to their organizations and contribute to a greater potential for project success. Project managers, though, experience high levels of occupational stress and burnout. Traditional human resource management approaches often produce limited results among project managers. The seemingly unique nature of occupational stress among project managers remained little understood.
Dr. Philip Harbin, a career project and program manager, designed his doctoral research at Grand Canyon University to explore how IT project managers in the United States described their experience of occupational stress, its contributing factors, and how they have responded to the stress they experience. Dr. Harbin interviewed many project managers across the US to allow them to describe occupational stress in their own words. The study findings provide a rich understanding of occupational stress among project managers and can lead to better interventions and reducing burnout and turnover across organizations.
Finalist | Baker Rickaby, University College London - Managing Uncertainty in Real Time
Dr Baker Rickaby is a dedicated project management researcher and practitioner. His doctoral research at UCL, titled ”Managing Uncertainty in Real Time: A Case Study of High Speed 2 Railway Project,” advances understanding by shifting the focus from preemptive risk mitigation to how uncertainties emerge and are managed.
Collaborating with HS2, Baker identified key mechanisms in managing uncertainty in real time and developed a structured approach for how various project functions interact to manage uncertainty in unforeseen disruptions.
His findings emphasise the importance of adaptive strategies in navigating challenges within large infrastructure projects, making novel contributions to theory and practice.