Hector Okada da Silva won the 2017 GWIC-Braccini Thesis Prize for the best Ph.D. thesis on gravitational waves. Hector had already received several awards - including the Blue Apple Award for the best student talk in 2015 from the American Physical Society’s Topical Group in Gravitation, and a Graduate Achievement Award from the University of Mississippi in 2016 - but this is really an impressive achievement! Hector is now a postdoc at Montana State University, where he is doing some excellent work under the supervision of Nico Yunes. His dissertation (Compact Objects in Relativistic Theories of Gravity) can be downloaded here.